The depths of the soul; psycho-analytical studies

THE DEPTHS
OF THE SOUL

PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL STUDIES

Dedicated

to his dear friends

BESS AND OSCAR BLUMENTHAL

in remembrance of

his delightful stay

in Chicago, 1921

THE AUTHOR

!^-W'

THE DEPTHS
OF THE SOUL

PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL STUDIES

BY

DR. WILLIAM STEKEL

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
BY

DR. S. A. TANNENBAUM

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.

Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, E.C.

1921

PREFACE

An old proverb says that every parent loves
the ugly duckling most. My book, The Depths
of the Soul, was, from its beginning, my favourite.
It was written in the beautiful years in which
the first rays of analytic psychognosis penetrated
the darkness of the human soul. The reader
may find between the lines the exuberant joy of
a discoverer. First impressions are the strongest.
It is an unfortunate fact that subsequent im-
pressions lack the vividness, the intensity, the
warmth, and the colours of the first emotions.

The great success of this book in many foreign
languages has given me incalculable pleasure,
because it has served to confirm my own bHnd
love. No other book has brought me so many
friends from far and near.

I am happy that my friend Dr. Tannenbaum
has devoted his knowledge of the art of trans-
lation to my favourite child, and I hope that
this translation will bring me many new English
friends.

THE AUTHOR.

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CONTENTS

PAOB

The Second World i

Gratitude and Ingratitude ii

Unpacking One's Heart ao

Laziness ag

Those Who Stand Outside 38

What Children Aspire To 4«

Independence 57

Jealousy 65

Childhood Friendship 73

Eating 80

Are We All Megalomaniacs ? . . . . 91

Running Away From Home 98

Dead-Heads 108

Identification .115

Refuge in Disease 125

Why We Travel 133

Moody Persons . . . . . . .143

Overvalued Ideas 132

Affectionate Parents 161

Why They Quarrel ....... 171

Looking into the Future 180

Looking Backward 191

All-Souls 201

Mirror Slaves aio

THE SECOND WORLD

To poets it is a familiar world. The ordinary
mortal wanders about in its wonderful gardens
as if he were blind ; he lives in it without know-
ing it. He does not know where the real world
stops and where the fantasy world begins. In the
treadmill of grey day the invisible boundaries
between these two worlds escape him.

The second world ! What would our life
be without it ? What a vale of tears would
this globe be were it not for this heaven on
earth !

The reader probably guesses what I mean.
All of us, the poorest and the richest, the smallest
and biggest, rarely or never find contentment
in our daily routine. We need a second sphere,
a richer life, in which we may dream of every-
thing that is denied us in the first sphere.
Ibsen called this "The Great Life-Lie." But
is it always a lie ? Did not Ibsen go too far
with this characterization ? Who could doubt
that this lie is not one of those eternal truths
that is so incorporeal that we cannot grasp it,
so colourless that we cannot see it, so formless
that we cannot describe it.

The child finds its second world in play.
The little duties of everyday life are for it only

(I)

2 THE SECOND WORLD

unnecessary interruptions in its play in the
second world. Here the child's fantasy has
ample room. It is a soldier, king, and robber,
cook, and princess ; it rides through a wide
world on steaming express trains, it battles
courageously with dragons and giants, it snatches
the treasures of the earth from their guardian
dwarfs, and even the stars in the heavens are
not beyond its reach in its play. Then comes the
powerful dictum called education and snatches
the child out of its beloved second world and
compels it to give heed to the first world and to
learn things necessary to it in its actual life.
The child learns of obligations and submits
unwillingly to the dictates of its teachers. The
first world is made up of duties. The second
world knows no duties ; it knows only freedom
and unrestrained freedom of thought. This is
the root of the subsequent great conflict between
feehngs and duties. In our childhood we find
duties a troublemaker who interferes with our
playing ; this childish hostility continues with
us all through life. Our vocation, the sphere
of our duties, can never wholly satisfy us. It
is our first world ; and even though we seem to
accept it wholly, a little remnant of this hostility
remains and this constitutes a part of our second
world.

Primitive people find their second world in
religion. From their primitive fears for the
preservation of their lives they flee to their
gods, whom they love and fear, punish and

THE SFXOND WORLD 3

reward. The same thing is true of all those
simple souls whom culture has not robbed of
their religious belief. To them religion is the
second world which gives them rich consolation
and solace for the pains of the first world.
In his book " Seelenkunde," Benedict attributes
anarchism to an absence of consolatory life-
lies. He says : " Our free-thinking times have
stopped up this source and it is the duty of
society to create a consoHng Hfe-truth, other-
wise that psychic inner life which hoards up
bitter hatred will not cease."

The more highly developed a person's mind
is, the more complicated is his second world.
People often express surprise at the fact that so
many physicians devote themselves passionately
to music or the other fine arts. To me it seems
very simple. All day long they see life in its
most disagreeable aspects. They see the
innocent sufferings, the frightful tortures which
they cannot relieve. They look behind the
curtain of the " happy family " ; they wade
through all the repellant and disgusting filthiness
of this petty world, and they would have to
become dull and non-partisan animals did they
not have their second world.

There is first of all music, which is so dear to
all of us because it is an all-embracing mother
which absorbs all the emotions of hatred, anger,
love, envy, fear, and despair, and fuses them all
into one great rhythm, into one great vibrating
emotion of pleasure. On its trembling waves

4 THE SECOND WORLD

the thoughts of the poor tortured human soul
are borne out into the darkness of uncomprehend-
ed eternity and the eternally incomprehensible.

Then there is literature. We open a book
and at once we are transported into the second
world of another ego, a world which in a few
minutes becomes our own. Happy poets, who
have been endowed with the gift of saying
what they see, of giving form to what they dream,
of freeing themselves from their energies, of
abreacting their secret sufferings and of making
others happy by opening up to them a second
world!

Then there are the thousand and one forms of
play ; sports and in fact everything that tears
us away from our daily grind. What is the
lottery ticket to the poor wage-earner but an
instalment on the pleasures of the second
world, or the purchased right of joyous hope ?

There is the devotion to clubs and fraternal
associations. The henpecked husband flees
wrathfuUy to his club where he can freely and
fearlessly launch all those fine argumentative
speeches which he has to suppress at home.
Here he can rule, here he can play the role of
the independent master. For many thousands
the club is nothing more than an opportunity
to work off their energies, to get rid of unused
emotions and to play that role which life in
the first sphere has denied them.

And thus everyone has his second world.
One who does not have it stands on the level of

THE SECOND WORLD 5

animals, or is the happiest of the happy. By
happiness I mean the employment of one's
energies in the first sphere. There is a wide
gulf between happiness and the consciousness
of happiness. The consciousness of happiness
is such a fugitive moment that the poorest
wage-slave in his second world can be happier
than the truly happy who does not happen to
be thinking of his happiness. Happiness is
like the possession of a beautiful wife. If we
are in danger of losing her we tremble. Before
we have obtained her and in moments of jealousy
we guard her possession as fortune's greatest
gift. But in the consciousness of undisturbed
possession can we be saying to ourselves every
second : I possess her, I am happy ? No ! no !
Happiness is the greatest of all life's lies and one
who has had least of it may be the happiest
in his second world.

Rose-coloured hope ! Queen of all pleasurable
emotions, our all-preserving and all-animating
goddess ! You are the sovereign of the second
world and beckon graciously the unhappy
weeping mortal who in the first world sees the
last traces of you disappear.

Marital happiness depends very largely upon
whether the two spheres of the couple partly
overlap or touch each other at a few points.
In the first world they must live together.
But woe if the second world keeps them asunder !
If the two spheres touch each other even only
in^pne^point^and have only one feeling tangent

6 THE SECOND WORLD

between them, that will bring them closer
together than all the cares and the iron constraint
of the first world. Women know this instinct-
ively, especially during the period of courtship.
They enthuse about everything over which
the lover enthuses ; they love and hate with
him and want to share everything with him.
Beware, you married women, of destroying
your husband's second world ! If after the day's
toil he soothes his tired nerves in the fateful
harmonies of Beethoven, do not disturb his
pious mood ; enthuse with him, do not carry
the petty cares and the vulgar commonplaces
of life into the lofty second world. Do you
understand me, or must I speak more plainly ?
Do not let him go alone on his excursions into
the second world ! A book that he reads alone,
understands alone, enjoys alone, may be more
dangerous to you than the most ardent glances
of a wanton rival. Art must never become the
man's second world. No ! It must become the
child of both the lovers if the beats of their
souls are to be harmonious.

True friendship is so lofty, so exalting, because
it is dependent upon a congruence of the second
spheres. Love is a linking of the first worlds
and if it is to be permanent it must journey
forth into the second world. Genuine friend-
ship is born in the second world and affects the
first world only retroactively.

The second world need not necessarily always
be the better world even though to its possessor

THE SECOND WORLD 7

it may appear to be the more beautiful and the
more desirable. Rarely enough it is the supple-
ment to the first world but frequently the
contrast and the complement to it. Pious
chaste natures may often give their coarser
instincts undisturbed expression in the second
world. Day-dreams are frequently the ex-
pression of life in the second world. But on
careful analysis even the dreams of the night
prove to be an unrestricted wallowing in the
waters of the second world. Dreams are
usually wish fulfillments, but in their lowest
levels we find the wishes of the second world
which are only rarely altered by unconscious
thought processes.

One who dreams during the day flies from the
first world into the second. If he fails to find
his way back again into the first world his
dreams become delusions and we say that he is
insane. How delicate are the transitions from
sanity to insanity ! Inasmuch as aU of us live
in a second world, all of us are insane at least
a few seconds every day. What distinguishes
us from the insane is the fact that we hold in
our hands the Ariadne thread which leads us
out of the labyrinth of thoughts back into the
world of duties.

It is incredible how happy an insane person
can be. Proudly the paranoid hack writer
marches up and down in his pitiful cell. Clothed
in rags, he is king and commands empires.
His cot is a heavenly couch of eiderdown ;

■« THE SECOND WORLD

his old dilapidated stool is a jewel-bedecked
throne. The attendants and the physicians are
his servants. And thus in his delusion he is
what he would like to be.

The world is only what we think it ; the
" thing itself " is only a convention of the
majority. A cured maniac assured me that the
period of his insanity had been the happiest
in his life. He saw everything through rose-
coloured glasses and the awful succession of
wild thoughts was only a succession of intensely
pleasurable emotions. Obviously those, on the
other hand, who suffer from melancholia and
delusions of inferiority are the unhappiest
creatures. The invalid who thinks himself made
of glass trembles apprehensively for his life
with every step. The unhappy experiences of
the first world have become so fixed in his brain
that they follow him into the second world and
transform even this into their own image.

Every impression in our life affects our soul
as if it were made of wax and not one such
impression can be lost. That we forget so many
impressions is due to the fact that we have re-
pressed them out of our consciousness.
Repression is a protective device but at the same
time a cause for many serious nervous disorders.
A painful impression, an unpleasant experience
in the first or the second world, is so altered as
to be unrecognizable in consciousness. As a
reaction to this serious nervous disturbances,
especially hysterical alterations of the psyche,

THE SECOND WORLD 9

may occur, — conditions which can be cured only
by tracing out the dark pathways of the repressed
emotions and reintroducing them into conscious-
ness. They are conjured out of the dark
realm of the unconscious into the glaring light
of day and, lo ! the ghosts vanish for all time
and with them all those unpleasant symptoms
which have so exercised the physician's skill.

If the psychotherapeutist is to fulfill his
difficult task he must acquaint himself with the
patient's second world even more thoroughly
than with the first. And so, too, a judge ought
never to pronounce sentence without first
having thoroughly penetrated the second world
of the condemned. In that world are the roots
of good and evil in human life. In his " Crime
and Punishment " Dostoyevsky's genius shows
in a masterly way the relationship between the
two worlds of a criminal. And so, too, Tolstoy,
in his " Resurrection," in an endeavour to enlist
our sympathies in her behalf, describes the second
world of a courtesan. It is her life-lie that she
makes all the men in her embrace blessed. And
in sooth, a spark of truth seems to slumber in
this life-lie.

Physicians, judges, lawyers, and ministers
ought all to have a thorough training in psychol-
ogy. Not psychology in the sense of that school
philosophy which flourishes in theoretical
phraseology and in theoretical facts remote
from the green tree of life. Life can learn only
from life. One who knows the secrets of the

10 THE SECOND WORLD

second world will not be surprised by any
happenings that the day may bring forth. He
will understand the weaknesses of the great
and the strength of the small.

He will see virtue and vice coalesce in one
great stream whose murky waters will flow on
into unknown regions.

GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE

Very few people perceive the ridiculous
element in the frequent complaints about the
wickedness of human nature. " Human
beings are ungrateful, false, untrustworthy,"
and so forth. Yes, but we are all human. We
ought, therefore, logically speaking, complain :
" We human beings are ungrateful, we are false,
we are untrustworthy." But naturally this
requires a measure of self-knowledge that is
seldom to be found in those bearing the vesture
of humanity. Let us make a modest beginning ;
let us try to look truth in the face. Let us not
put ourselves on a pinnacle above the others till
we know how high or low we ourselves stand.

We like to deceive ourselves, and, above all,
not to see our faults. That is the most prevalent
of all weaknesses. We look upon ourselves
not only as cleverer but also as better than all
others. We forget our faults so easily and divide
them by a hundred, whereas our virtues are
ever present to our mind and multiplied by a
thousand. To himself everybody is not only
the first but also the wisest and the best of
mortals. That is why we complain about the
ingratitude of our fellow-men, because we have
forgotten all the occasions on which we proved

12 GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE

ungrateful, — in exactly the same manner in
which we manage wholly to forget everything
calculated to awaken painful emotions in our-
selves.

The complaint about man's ingratitude is
as old as the history of man himself. The Bible,
ancient legends, the folk-songs, and the proverbs
of all nations, ancient and modern, bewail man's
ingratitude. It is " the touch of nature that
makes the whole world kin." A trait that is
so widely distributed, investing the egoist with
the glory of supreme worldy wisdom and brand-
ing the altruist as half a fool, must be founded
deep in the souls of men. It must be an integral
part of the circumstances conditioning the life
of the individual. It must send its roots down
into the unconscious where the brutal instincts
of primal man consort with humanity's ripened
instincts.

But if ingratitude is a genuinely (psychologic-
ally) established fact then we must be able to
determine the dark forces that have it in them
to suppress the elementary feeling of gratitude.
For even to the most casual observation it is
apparent that the first emotion with which we
re-act to a kindness is a warm feeling of recogni-
tion, gratitude. So thoroughly are we per-
meated by it that it seems impossible ever to
withhold this gratitude from our benefactor,
let alone repay him with ingratitude. The
first reaction with which the human soul requites
a kind deed is a firm purpose " ever " to be

GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE 13

grateful therefor. But purpose, " the slave to
memory," is only the puffed sail that drives the
boat until the force of the storm and the weak-
ness of the rudder compel a different course.
So, too, the intent to prove grateful is driven
about fitfully by the winds of life. Of course,
not at once. It requires the lapse of a certain
latency period ere gratitude is converted to
ingratitude. In the beginning the feeling of
gratitude reigns supreme. Slowly it grows
fainter and fainter, is inaudible for a time, then
on suitable occasions is heard again but ever
more faintly. After a while, quite unawares,
ingratitude has taken its place. All those
pleasurable emotions that have accompanied
gratitude have been transformed into their
opposites : love into hatred, attraction into
aversion, interest into indifference, praise into
censure, and friendship into hostility.

How does this come about ? Where lie the
sources of these hidden streams that drive the
wheels of our emotions ?

. We pointed out at the very beginning that
everybody regards himself as the wisest, the
best, and the most capable of men. Our weak-
nesses we acknowledge very reluctantly. A
losing chess-player is sure to say in ninety-nine
out of a hundred instances : "I did not play
this game well." The opponent's superiority
is always denied ; defeat is attributed to a
momentary relaxation of the psychic tension,
to carelessness, to some accident, etc. And if

14 GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE

an individual is compelled to admit another's
superiority, he will do so only with reference
to some one point. He will always make re-
servations leaving himself some sphere of activity
in which he is king. That constitutes a man's
secret pride : the sphere in which he thinks he
excels all others. This self-consciousness,
this exaggerated apperception of the ego is a
natural basis of life, a protective device of the
soul which makes life bearable, which makes it
easier to bear our fardels and endure the pricks of
destiny, and which compensates us for the world's
inadequate recognition of us and for the failure
of our efforts which must inevitably come short
of our intentions. " The paranoid delusion of
the normal human being," as Philip Frey aptly
named it, is really the individual's " fixed idea "
which proves him to be in a certain sense patho-
logic and justifies the opinion that the whole
world is a great madhouse.

This exaggerated self-consciousness manifests
itself with pathological intensity especially in
these times. The smaller the individual's share
in the real affairs of the world is, the more must
his fantasy achieve so as to magnify this func-
tion and have it appear as something of vital
importance. In those cases in which individual-
ity is crushed, a hypertrophied delusion of great-
ness is developed. Everyone thinks himself
important, everyone is indispensable, everyone
thinks himself an important power in the play
and interplay of forces. Our era has created

GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE 15

the type of the " self-made man." Everyone
is willing to be indebted only to himself, his
qualifications, his power of endurance, his
energy, his individual efforts for his achieve-
ments. " By his own efforts " — so runs the
much-abused phrase, — does each one want to
get to the top.

All want it — but how few really make it come
true ! Who can know to-day what is his own
and what another's ? Who knows how much he
had to take before he was able to give anything ?
But no one wants to stop for an accounting.
Each one wants to owe everything to himself.

Something of this is in everyone of us. And
this brings us to the deepest root of ingratitude.
The feeling of being indebted to another clashes
with our self-confidence ; the unpleasant truth
contrasts sharply with the normal's deep-rooted
delusions of greatness. In this conflict of
emotions there is only an either ... or.
Either once for all to renounce this exaggerated
self-consciousness, or to forget the occasion
for gratitude, to repress this painful memory,
to let the ulcerous wound on the proud body of
the " ego " heal to a scar. (The exceptions
that prove the rule in this matter, too, we shall
consider later.)

The first road that assures us eternal gratitude
is chosen only by those who by the " bludgeon-
ings of fate " have been wholly stunned, who are
life-weary, — feel themselves goaded to death, —
the wholly crushed. These unfortunates no

i6 GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE

longer need the play of their hidden psychic
forces. The need of the body has strangled
the cry of the soul. These are grateful, grateful
from conviction, grateful from necessity. Their
dreams are veritable orgies of benefactions.
For them the benefactor is the deUverer from
bodily torment. They see " dead souls "
whom everyone who so desires may purchase.
But one who has not for ever renounced the
fulfillment of his inmost longings will rarely be
capable of gratitude. His ego resents being
indebted to anyone but himself. But this ego
will never permit itself to face the naked brutal
fact of its ingratitude. It seeks for causes and
motives, for justification. In this case the
proverb again proves true : " seek and you shall
find," the kindness is scrutinised from every
side till a little point is found which reveals a
bit of calculating egoism from which the kindness
takes on a business aspect. And what human
action does not permit of many interpretations ?
Our self-preservation impulse then chooses
the interpretation that suits us best, the inter-
pretation that relieves us of the oppressive
feeling of gratitude. Such is the first step in
the transformation of gratitude into ingratitude.
Rarely does the matter rest there. Usually
it requires also a transformation of the emotion
into its opposite ere the galling feeling of grati-
tude can be eradicated. What execrable
wretches would we not appear even to ourselves
if we could not work out reasons for the changes

GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE 17

in our feelings ? And so we convert the good
deed into a bad one ; if possible, we discover
stains and blots in our benefactor's present
life or pursuits that can blacken the spotless-
ness of his past. Not until we have done this
are we free from the oppressive feeling of
gratitude. Thus, with no further reason for
being grateful left, our personal pride survives un-
shaken, the bowed ego again stands proudly erect.
This explanation of the psychology of ingrati-
tude draws the veil from a series of remarkable
phenomena which we pass by in our daily life
without regard or understanding. We shall
cite only a few instances from the many at our
disposal : the ingratitude of servants and all
subordinates, — a species of ingratitude that is
so obvious that if an exception occurs the
whole world proclaims it as an exception ; the
ingratitude of pupils to the teacher to whom
they owe all (this explains the common phen-
omenon that pupils belittle the scientific attain-
ments of the teacher, — a phenomenon that may
almost be designated " the pupil's neurosis ") ;
the deep hatred with which artists regard those
of their predecessors to whom they are most
indebted ; , the tragedy of the distinguished sons
whose fathers paved the way for them ; the
great injustice of invalids towards the physicians
to whom they owe their lives ; the historic
ingratitude of nations to their great leaders and
benefactors ; the stubborn ignoring of the living
great ones and the measureless overvaluation

i8 GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE

of the dead ; the perpetual opposition to what-
ever administration may be in power, whence
is derived a fragment of the psychology of
discontent ; the quite frequent transformation
of a friendship into its opposite.

Verily, one who counts upon gratitude is
singularly deficient in knowledge both of human
nature and of his own nature. In this connec-
tion, we must consider also the fact that owing
to an excessive overvaluation of the performance
of our most obvious duties, we demand gratitude
even when there is no reason for expecting it.
I refer to only one example : Is there not an
obvious obligation on parents to provide to the
best of their ability for the child that they have
brought into the world ? Notwithstanding
this we daily preach to our children : " You
must be grateful to us for all that we do for you,
for your food, your clothes, your education."
And is it not a fact that this insistence upon the
duty of children to be grateful begets the op-
posite: ingratitude ? Should we not rather strive
to hold our children with only one bond, love P

Let us be just and also admit that really
grateful human beings are to be found ; persons
whom life has not wearied and who lose none
of their dignity though they are grateful.
These are the spiritually pre-eminent individuals
who have forced themselves to the recognition
of the fact that no one is an independent unit,
that our valuation of ourselves is false, in-
dividuals who have succeeded, by the aid of

GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE 19

psychoanalytic self-knowledge, to reduce the
normal person's delusional greatness to the
moderation warranted by reality.

Such persons are grateful because their
valuation of themselves is fed by other springs.
The knowledge of the frailties of humanity in
general compensates them for the failing of the
human in the individual. The greatest number
of grateful persons will be found in the ranks of
the geniuses, whereas talented persons are
generally addicted to ingratitude. Genius
can easily be grateful inasmuch as the frank
recognition of one's weaknesses and the secret
knowledge of one's achievements do not permit
the suppression of the greatness of others.
One who has so much to give need not be
ashamed to have accepted something. And
more especially as he knows with certainty that
in life everyone must accept. . . .

Truly great men are notably modest. Modesty
is the knowledge of one's own shortcomings.
Vanity, the overvaluation of one's endowments.
Gratitude is the modesty of the great ; ingrati-
tude the vanity of the small. Only those are
grateful who really have no occasion for being
so. A genuine benefactor finds his thanks in
good works. In dealing with this theme one
must think of Vischer's verses : —

" If poison and gall make the world bitter,

And your heart you would preserve ;

Do deeds of kindness ! and you will learn

That doing good rejoices."

UNPACKING ONE'S HEART

The average human being finds it helpful
to free himself from his impressions by " pouring
out his heart " to someone. Like a sponge,
the soul saturates itself ; like a sponge, it must be
squeezed dry before it can fill itself up again.
But now and then it happens that the soul
cannot rid itself of its impressions. Such
persons, we say, are soul-sick and we recognise
those who suffer from soul-sickness by the fact
that they sedulously shun new impressions.
Every disease of the soul rests ultimately
upon a secret.

Children exhibit in clear and unmistakable
ways the reactions of their elders. In the
presence of a secret they behave exactly as the
normal person ought to behave. They cannot
keep it to themselves. I recall very distinctly
that as a child I was unable to sit a quarter of
an hour without speaking. Repeatedly my
parents promised me large rewards if I would sit
a quarter of an hour without asking them a
question or making some remark. The promised
reward was increased from day to day because
I never was quiet for more than half of the
allotted period. But the obligation to keep a
" secret " was even more discomforting to me.

(30)

UNPACKING ONE^S HEART 21

On one occasion my brother was to be given a
silver watch for his birthday. For three days
I went about oppressed and restive as if some-
thing was seriously amiss. I prowled around
him, watching him intently with suppressed
excitement, so that he finally noticed my strange
behaviour and demanded to know what I wanted.
On the day before his birthday I could contain
myself no longer and while we were at dinner I
burst out with, " Oh, you don't know that you
are going to get a silver watch to-morrow ! "

All children are, doubtless, like that. A
secret is to them an unbearable burden. When
the time comes that they must keep some matters
secret from their parents because an inexplic-
able shyness makes them ashamed to talk
everything over with them freely, they change
their attitude towards their parents and seek out
a companion of their own age, some friend with
whom they can discuss their secret.

Adults are really as little capable of going
about with a secret as children are. It tortures
and oppresses them Hke a heavy burden ; and
they are happy to rid themselves of it one way
or another. If they cannot speak of it openly
and frankly then they do so in some hidden,
secret, or symbolic way. I could cite numerous
illustrations of this but shall content myself
with only one. A woman who had committed
the unpardonable sin became troubled with a
remarkable compulsive action. She was
continually washing her hands. Why ? Be.

22 UNPACKING ONE'S HEART

cause she was dominated by the feeling that
she was dirty, that she had become unclean.
She could not tell any one in the world what she
had done ; she would have loved to say to her
husband and to the whole household : " Do
not touch me ! I am impure, unclean, an out-
cast ! " She had found a means of making
this confession, but she did so in a form which
only the expert can understand. At every
appropriate and inappropriate occasion she
washed her hands. If she was asked why she
washed her hands she answered, " Because they
are not clean." Such symbolic actions are
extremely common and constitute a kind of
" speech without words " (to use Kleinpaul's
apt words). But a symbolic action is nothing
but a substitution, a compromise between
antagonistic psychic currents. It bears, how-
ever, no comparison with the freeing effect of
pouring one's heart out in words to a person,
a confidant one can trust.

We know from the statements of convicts
that nothing is so hard to bear in prison as the
impossibility of " getting things off their chest."
And why is it that when touring foreign countries
we so readily make friends with our towns-
people whom we happen to meet, though at home
we are quite indifferent to them ? Because
they furnish the opportunity for a good talk,
because to a certain extent they become recepta-
cles into which we may empty our soul's accumu-
lations. The profound yearning that we all

UNPACKING ONE'S HEART 23

harbour for friendship, for a sympathetic soul,
emanates from the imperative need for pouring
our hearts out. By means of a good talk of
this sort, we " abreact," or throw off a part of
our pent-up excitement. Children are much
more fortunate than we in this regard. How
easily they find a friend ! The first-best play-
fellow becomes a friend and confidant within
half an hour. But for us grown-ups the matter is
much more difficult. Before we can take any
one into our confidence, take him to our bosom,
he must satisfy certain social and ethical re-
quirements. But in reality we disclose only
the surface and retain our most oppressive
secrets deep down at the bottom of the soul unless
a sudden storm of passion overcomes us ; then
the sluice-gates burst open and the dammed
up waters pour out in turgid torrents, carrying
everything before them.

The tremendous power of the Roman Catholic
Church is even to-day due to the fact that it
enables its members to confess their most
secret sufferings from time to time and to be
absolved. Dr. Muthmann calls attention to
the fact that suicides are most frequent in
Protestant countries, and least frequent among
Roman-Catholic peoples, and he thinks that
this is to be attributed to the influence of the
confessional, one of the greatest blessings for
numberless people.

The psycho-analytic method of treating
nervous diseases has not only made the incal-

24 UNPACKING ONE'S HEART

culable benefit of confession its own but has
united with it the individual's spiritual education
inasmuch as it teaches him how to know himself
and to turn his eyes into the darkest depths of
his soul. But there is also a kind of speaking
out that is almost equivalent to confession —
self-communion. That is, one's communings
with oneself. For, as Grillparzer says, every
heart has its secrets that it anxiously hides
even from itself. Not all of us know how to
detect such secrets. The poet has this gift.
As Ibsen beautifully says : " To live is to master
the dark forces within us ; to write is to sit in
judgment on ourselves." But only a poet
is able to sit in judgment on his own soul. Not
every person has the capacity for self-communion.
Most of the diseases of the soul depend upon the
peculiar mechanism that Freud has called
" repression." This " repression " is a semi-
forgetting of displeasing impressions and ideas.
But only a half-forgetting. For a part of the
repressed idea establishes itself in some disguised
form as a symptom or as some form of nervous
disease. In these cases the psychotherapeutist
must apply his art and teach the invalid to
know himself.

Goethe knew the value of confession. He
reports that he once cured a Lady Herder by
confession. On September 25th, 181 1, he
wrote to Mrs. Stein : " Last night I wrought a
truly remarkable miracle. Lady Herder was
still in a hypochondriacal mood in consequence

UNPACKING ONE'S HEART 25

of the unpleasantnesses she had experienced
in Carlsbad, especially at the hands of her
family. I had her confess and tell me every-
thing, her own shortcomings as well as that of
the others, in all their minutest details and
consequences, and at last I absolved her and
jestingly made her understand that by this
ritual these things had now been disposed of
and cast into the deeps of the sea. Thereupon
she became merry and is really cured." Here
we have the basic principles of modern psycho-
therapy. Unconsciously, by virtue of the hidden
power of his genius, the poet accomplished
what modern therapeutists also attempt.

Nietzsche, too, fully understood the value of
confession. We are accustomed at once to
associate with Nietzsche the concept of the
Antichrist. That he has accurately conceived
the essence of the true priest he shows in his
description of the priestly temper in his book,
" The Joyful Wisdom." He says, " the people
honour a wholly different kind of man, . .
They are the mild, earnest, simple, and modest
priestly natures .... before whom one
may pour out one's heart with impunity, upon
whom one may unload one's secrets, one's
worries, and what's even worse." (The man who
shares himself with another frees himself from
himself ; and one who has acknowledged, forgets.)

It would be impossible to state the value of
confession more beautifully and more clearly.
It will not be long ere this view which knocks

26 UNPACKING ONE'S HEART

commandingly at the door of science and which
has already been productive of good will be
generally accepted. It will not be long ere it
will furnish us a deep insight into the genesis
of the " endogenetic mental diseases," excepting,
of course, those " exogenetic " maladies that
follow some of the infectious diseases. We
shall look upon the " endogenetic " diseases,
even delusions, as a disturbance of the psychic
circulation, and it will be our task to ascertain
the causes that bring these maladies about.
There are numbers of substitutes which are
equivalent to a kind of confessing to oneself.
These are art, reading of newspapers, music,
literature, and, least but not last, the theatre.
The ultimate effect of a dramatic presentation
depends, in reality, upon the liberation in us
of affects that have been a long time pent up
within us. It is not without good reason that
humanity throngs to witness tragic plays during
the performance of which it can cry to its heart's
content. When the spectators are apparently
shedding tears over the unhappy fate of a
character on the stage they are really crying
over their own pain. And the woman who
laughs so heartily at the awkward clumsiness
of a clown, that the tears run down her cheeks,
is perhaps laughing at her husband, who, though
she will not acknowledge it, appears to her just
as stupid and clumsy ; she is thereby excusing
to herself her own sins which she has possibly
committed only in fantasy. The theatre serves

UNPACKING ONE'S HEART 27

as a kind of confessional ; it liberates inhibitions ;
awakens many memories, consoles, and perhaps
renews in us hopes of secret possibilities as to
whose fulfillment we have long since despaired.

We have become accustomed of late to sus-
pect sex-motives behind friendship. Even
if we accept the theory that these motives are
present, but hidden in the unconscious, it is a
far from adequate explanation for the longing
for friendship. The unconscious sex-motive
unquestionably co-operates in a significant
measure in the choice of a friend. It may be
the determining factor in what we call sympathy
and antipathy, although it would have to be
proved with regard to the latter, and the theme
is deserving of separate consideration, for it is
quite possible that our antipathies are only
reactions to an excessive attraction and there-
fore are evidence of repression. Looked at
from this point of view, sympathy and antipathy
are one feeling, one affect, having in the former
case a positive sign and in the latter a negative
sign. This secret tendency may be the deciding
factor in the choice of a friend. But the need
for a friend surely is in direct relation to the need
for confession.

It is customary to ridicule the Germans'
passion for forming clubs, and societies of all
kinds. But do these founders of fraternal
associations seek for anything but an opportunity
to fraternise, to have a good talk, something
from which they are barred at home ? The

28 UNPACKING ONE'S HEART

innumerable speeches that are deKvered during
the course of a year, and which are being poured
out every second in an endless stream in some
house at some meeting are apparently being
spoken only for the benefit of the auditors.
But every speech is a kind of relief to the speaker's
" I," and people who have the craving to speak
before the whole world are very often the
keepers of a great secret which they must
conceal from the world and which they are
imparting in this indirect way in homoeopathic
doses. Just as a dye that is dissolved in a large
quantity of fluid is so completely lost that the
naked eye can detect no trace of it, so do occa-
sional particles of the great secret which must for-
ever remain hidden find their way into the
elocutionary torrent.

LAZINESS

There are commonplace maxims which people
go on repeating thoughtlessly, and in the light
of which they determine their conduct without
once stopping to consider whether the assumed
truth, looked at in the light of reason, may not
turn out to be a lie. We know, of course, that
there are many " truths " which may under
certain circumstances prove to be falsehoods.
Everything is in a state of flux ! Truth and
falsehood are wave crests and wave troughs, an
endless stream driving the mills of humanity.

Such notorious maxims as the following are
trumpeted into our ears from the days of our
youth : " Work makes life sweet " ; " Satan
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do " ;
" the life of man is three-score-and-ten, and if it
has been a happy one it is due to work and
striving." These truisms are beaten into us,
drummed into us, and hammered into us from
all sides ; we hear them wherever we go, till
finally we accept them, completely convinced.

And it is well that it is so. What would the
world look like if everybody pressed his claim to
laziness ? Think of the hideous chaos that
would ensue if the wheels of industry came to
a stop !

(a9)

30 LAZINESS

The admonition to work has its origin in
humanity's instinct of self-preservation. It
does not spring from one's own needs but only
from the needs of others. Apparently we all
work for ourselves, but in reality we are always
working for others. How very small is the
number of those who do their work gladly and
cheerfully ! How very many give vent to their
aversion to work by means of apparent dis-
satisfaction with their calling ! And where can
we find a man nowadays who is contented with
his calling ?

Let us begin our study of man with that period
of his life in which he was not ashamed to show
his impulses to the light of day, in which re-
pression and education had not yet exerted
their restraining influences, — in other words,
let us begin with the observation of childhood.
With astonishment we note, first, that the
child's impulse to idleness is stronger than the
impulse to work. Play is for a long time the
child's idleness as well as its work. A gymnast
who proudly swings the heaviest dumb-bells
before his colleagues would vent himself in
curses, deep if not loud, if he had to do this as
work ; the heavy-laden tourist who pants his
way up steep mountain paths would curse his
very existence if he had to travel these difficult
trails in the service of mankind in the capacity
of — let us say — letter-carrier ; the card player
who works in the sweat of his brow for hours
in the stuffy caf6 to make his thousand or ten

LAZINESS ji

thousand points would complain bitterly at his
hard lot and at the cruelty of his employers if
he had to do an equivalent amount of work in
the office. Anything that does not bear the
stamp of work becomes in the play-form re-
creation and a release from almost unbearable
tyranny.

The child's world is play. Unwillingly and
only on compulsion does it perform imposed
tasks. (It would have even its education made
a kind of play.) Many parents worry about
this and complain that their children take no
pleasure in work, seem to have no sense of duty,
forget to do their school work, and have to be
forced to do their exercises. Stupid parents !
If they only stopped to think they would realise
that this frank display of an impulse to laziness
is a sign of their children's sanity. For we
often enough observe the opposite phenomenon.
Children who take their duties too seriously,
who wake too early in the morning lest they
should be late for school, who are always poring
over their books, scorning every opportunity
to play, are usually " nervous " children.
Exaggerated diligence is one of the first symptoms
of neurosis.

One who can look back upon his own child-
hood must admit that the impulse to indolence
is stronger than any other childhood impulse.
I recall how unwillingly I went to high-school.
Once I read in a newspaper that a high-school
had burned to the ground and that the pupils

32 LAZINESS

would not be able to go to school for several
weeks. For days I and my friends were dis-
appointed as we looked at our own grey school
building that stood there safe and sound. Had
it not burned down yet ? ! Were we not to
have any luck at all ? !

Who is not acquainted with the little sadistic
traits that almost all children openly manifest ?
Such a sadistic motive was our secret hope that
this or that teacher would get sick and we would
be excused from attendance at school. What a
joy once possessed the whole class when we
discovered that the Latin teacher was sick
just on the day when we should have had to
recite in his subject ! That was a grand prize !

And how the child detests always being
driven to work ! Always the same dis-
agreeable questions : " Have you no lessons
to do to-day ? " " Have you done all your
lessons ? " The profoundest wish of all who do
not yet have to provide for themselves is once
to get a chance to be as lazy as their hearts
might desire.

But we adults, too, who know the pleasure of
work and of fulfilled obligations, long for idle-
ness. For us, too, the vice of laziness is an
exquisite pleasure. We find it necessary con-
tinually to overcome the tendency to laziness
by new little resolutions. In the morning
laziness whispers : stay a little longer in your
warm bed ; it's so comfortable. Another few
seconds and the sense of duty prevails over the

LAZINESS 33

desire for idleness. In the afternoon we would
love to spend an hour in pleasant day-dreams.
Work conquers this wish too. And with what
difficulty we get out of the performance of some
task in the evening ! It is an everlasting con-
flict even though it is in most cases a subcon-
scious conflict with the sweet seducer of mankind :
laziness.

That is why the lawgivers have ordained days
on which the urge for laziness may be gratified.
These are called hoHdays. Religion has made
of this right to laziness a duty to God. The
more holidays a religion has, the more welcome
must it appear to labouring humanity. That
is why the various religious systems so readily
take over one another's hoHdays. The Catholic
Church appropriated ancient heathenish feasts,
and Jews bow to the Sunday's authority just
as the Christian does.

Persons who suppress the inclination to lazi-
ness get sick. Their nerves fail soon and their
capacity for work suffers serious diminution.
And then we say that they had overworked.
Not at all infrequently illness is only a refuge in
idleness, a defence against a hypertrophied
impulse to work. This is frequently observable
in persons afflicted with nervousness. They are
unfit for work, waste themselves away in endless
gloomy broodings, in bitter self-reproaches,
and in hypochondriacal fears. They do not
tire of repeatedly protesting how happy they
would be if they could get back to work again.

34 LAZINESS

But if their unconscious mental life is analyzed
one discovers with astonishment that the
greatest resistance to a cure is offered by their
laziness, the fear of work. This is one of the
greatest dangers for the nervous patient. If a
neurotic has once tasted of the sweets of lazi-
ness it is a very difficult matter to get him to
work again. All the varieties of fatigue
" cramps " known to neurologists, e.g,^ writer's
cramp, pianist's cramp, violinist's cramp, type-
writer's cramp, etc., are rebellions on the part
of the tendency to laziness. A return to work is
possible only if, in the absence of an actual organic
malady, the psychic element we have called
" refuge in disease " (q.v.) is taken into con-
sideration and given due weight.

This reluctance to work is most frequently
noticeable in the puzzling " traumatic neuroses,"
the so-called " accident or compulsion hysterias "
in which the so-called " hunger for damages "
plays the most important role. Since labourers
have acquired the right to recover damages for
accidental injuries, the number of traumatic
neuroses has increased so tremendously that
insurance companies can scarcely meet the claims.
This is also true of the neuroses following rail-
way and street car accidents. Only seldom can
objective injuries be demonstrated in these
cases. But notwithstanding this, the injured
person becomes depressed, moody, sleepless,
and utterly unfit for any work. Yet it would
be very unjust to consider them simulators.

LAZINESS SI

They are really sick. Their psychic make-up
has suffered a bad shaking-up. The pleasure in
work has suffered a rude shock because of the
unconscious prospect of pecuniary " damages,"
i,e, of an opportunity for laziness. Repressed
desires from childhood are re-animated. Why
should you work, says the alluring voice of the
unconscious, when you can lounge about and
live on an income ? Don't be a fool ! Get
sick like the others who loll about idly and need
not work ! And consciousness, in its weakness,
takes no note of the conflict in the unconscious,
is frightened by the unknown restlessness and
sleeplessness and gets sick . . . It is an
obstinate conflict between laziness and industry
from which only too often the former emerges
triumphant . . .

Finally, the need for laziness becomes over-
powering in all of us from time to time. We
long for a vacation. We want to recuperate
from work. Well, there are a few sensible
people. These go off into a corner somewhere
and are as lazy as they can be. They lie in
the grass and gaze at the heavens for hours ;
or they go fishing in some clear stream, — one
of the best ways of wasting time ; they sit in
a rowboat, letting someone else do the rowing or
just keeping the boat in motion with an occasional
stroke. In this way day after day is spent in
dolce far niente until one wearies of laziness
and an intense longing for work fills one's whole
being. Variety is the spice of life. Without

36 LAZINESS

idleness work loses its charm and value.

Others employ their vacation for new work.
These are the eternally restless, industrious,
indefatigable ones for whom idleness does not
exist. The impulse to laziness which was once
so strong, is suppressed and converted into its
opposite. These are usually persons who had
their fill of laziness in childhood and who
thoroughly enjoyed their youth. (We may
refer briefly to a few well-known instances of
this : there was Charles Darwin who began to
work only after he left college ; Bismarck,
whose student days were a period of riot and
idleness ; John Hunter was another striking
example.)

These continue with their work even while
they are on their vacation. They make work
even of their visits to art galleries, museums,
show-places, and of their breathless flying
trips hither and thither. This is really not the
kind of idleness that means a relaxation of
tension. It's only a variation in the kind of
impressions. A sea-voyage would be a com-
promise between the two antagonistic tenden-
cies. That is why Englishmen prefer a sea-
voyage to other forms of rest. On board ship
a person must be lazy. He sits on deck and
stares at the waves. The vastness of the sea
stands between him and his work. He must be
idle. Impressions fly by him ; he does not have
to go in search of them.

The right to laziness is one of the rights that

LAZINESS 37

sensible humanity will learn to consider as
something self-evident. For the time being we
are still in conflict with ourselves. We shun the
truth. We look upon laziness as something
degrading. We still stand in too much awe of
ourselves to be able to find the right measure.
Our mothers' voices still ring in our ears : " Have
you done your lessons ? "

THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE

I am at the Circus with my children. They
are laughing and clapping their hands in glee.
They are delighted with the grotesque antics
of the stupid clown. In vain I try to kindle
my own enthusiasm at theirs as a means of
banishing the unpleasant feeling of being bored.
The peculiar odour of a menagerie pervades the
great building and brings back to me, by way of
the obscure paths that connect our thoughts,
memories of days long since dead. I am myself
a child again, my cheeks hot and flushed,
sitting in the topmost gallery at the Circus, as
excited as if I were beholding the greatest of all
earthly wonders.

It is just when one of the star attractions is
being given. A skilled athlete is vaulting over
very great obstacles. He leaps over ten men in a
row, five horses, a little garden. His faultless
dress-suit shows scarcely a wrinkle after this
feat. This too must be counted among the
advances made by modern art. In my boyhood
days athletes still wore a gay uniform and
" worked " in costume. To-day every j uggler and
prestidigitator is a pattern of a drawing-room
gentleman. Some may be making a virtue of
necessity and gladly escape the exhibiting of

(38)

THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE 39

their none too handsome bodies.

These reflections are suddenly interrupted by
a blare of noisy music. Everybody is excited,
for this seems to indicate that the athlete's
most wonderful trick is coming. True ; some-
thing out of the ordinary is happening. Through
a wide gate an old-fashioned comfortable, drawn
by a weary nag, is brought into the arena and
our valiant athlete leaps over horse and rider
amidst the thunderous applause of the enthusias-
tic youngsters and of those of their elders who
have remained children in spirit.

The easy-going driver turns his vehicle to-
wards the exit. Again the portals open wide.
Bands of bright daylight pour into the half-
darkened amphitheatre. In the glare one
catches sight, for a moment, of a little $ection
of the life that swarms round about the fringe
of the Circus. There is the soda-water vendor
with his gay-coloured cart, a labourer, a few ser-
vant girls, and some twenty little children staring
with big eyes eagerly into the darkness of the
arena in the hope of catching a glimpse of all
this magnificence.

I shall never forget the sight. Those children's
eyes, opened so tremendously wide, longing to
catch a bit of happiness I How they envy the
fortunate ones sitting in here and beholding
real fairy-tale wonders !

I lapse into a day-dream again. I too am one
of those little ones standing out there ; I count
the richly-caparisoned horses that are being led

40 THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE

in ; for the twentieth time I read the large
placard announcing an " elite performance " ;
I am so happy as the beautiful equestrienne
passes right by me ; the muffled sounds of the
music penetrate to my ears ; I hear the animated
applause and the bravos. One thought possesses
me : I must get in ! Cost what it may, I must
go in !

Oh, I could have committed a theft to enable
myself to get in there and share in the applause !
And I thought to myself, if I am ever a rich man
I shall go to the Circus every day. How excitedly
I go home then, talking about all the wonderful
things I have seen, and how in my dreams all
my wishes are realized — all these things take
on a tangible shape before my mind's eye.

I note that it was the most beautiful period of
my life, the time when I used to stand outside.
In those days I still had a sense of the wonderful.
There was a touch of secret magic about every-
thing. Even dead things had a message for me.
Before me was an endless wealth of possibilities ;
and there stretched before me kingdoms of the
future over which my childish wishes flew like
migratory birds.

Verily — happiness is only anticipating possi-
bilities, denying impossibilities. Life is filled
up with dreams of the future. What we know
seems trivial when measured by the knowledge
we would like to acquire. Possession kills
desire ; realization slays fantasy and transforms
the wonderful into the commonplace.

THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE 41

All the beauty of this world lies only in the
fantasies which reality can never approximate.
The marvels of the present are seen only by those
who stand outside.

Every time that one of the portals that had
been locked from our youthful eyes opened,
every time longing became fulfilment, we
became one pleasure poorer and one disappoint-
ment richer. Only with the aid of the stilts
supplied us by philosophy can we rise above
the depressing disillusionment of experience. Or,
in playing our part in the great drama of life,
we cling to the one role we have studied and keep
on repeating it to ourselves until we, too, almost
believe it. Then we succeed again in seizing
a fringe of the magnificent purple mantle
with which we aspired to adorn our life.

Those outside see everything on a much larger
scale, finer, and grander. That is why we envy
others their possessions, their realities, their call-
ing. Because we proj ect the inevitable disappoint-
ments of Hfe upon the thing that is readiest at
hand — and that is unquestionably our vocation.
Our wishes circle around others' possibilities.

Involuntarily an experience from my youth
occurs to me. I had for the first time in my
life made the acquaintance of a poet. He was a
well-known lyrist of that day and his delightful
verses had charmed me for years. He did not
in any way come up to the ideal that I had
conceived of what a poet ought to be. The edges
of his eyelids were red, his face was commonplace,

42 THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE

and lie had a large paunch. The manner in
which he drank his coffee disgusted me. A
little coffee dripped down on his dirty grey
beard and with the movements of his big upper
jaw some cake crumbs danced up and down on
his moustache.

And that was the poet who wrote those
passionate little lyrics ! Overcoming my
disappointment, I entered into conversation
with him and let him perceive something of
my admiration. He was to be envied for
possessing the gift of transforming his moods
and experiences into works of art !

To my astonishment the poet began to describe
with palpable resentment the shortcomings of
his calling. If he had only become an honest
craftsman ere he had devoted himself to writing !
He was sick of the hard struggle. To be ever
at loggerheads with the public, the critics, the
publishers, and editors — those were the com-
pensations of his calling. He envied me for
being a phsyician. That's a great, a noble,
an ideal calling. A physician can do something
for humanity ! If he were not too old he would
at once take up the study of medicine. To
mitigate the pains of an invalid is worth more
than writing a hundred good lyrics !

In those days I was not a little proud of the
profession I had chosen. The poet was only
saying openly what I thought in secret. " The
physician is mankind's minister." How often
later on have I heard these and similar words

THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE 43

which were calculated to add fuel to the flame
of idealism.

Ye gods ! In real life how sad is the physician's
lot ! Those outside cannot conceive it. The
first thing to realize is the rarity of the instances
in which the physician really snatches the victim
from the clutches of Death ; how rarely he
eliminates suffering ; how frequently, dis-
couraged and bewildered, he fails to halt the
ravages of disease. How his idealism makes
him suffer ! He is painfully aware that the
craftsman comes nearer to his ideals than the
artist. He becomes familiar with man's limit-
less ingratitude and realizes that unless he is to
go into bankruptcy he must adopt the " practi-
cal " methods of the business man. He is the
slave of his patients, has no holidays, not a free
minute in which he is not reminded of his
dependance. He sees former colleagues and
friends who have accumulated fortunes in
business or in the practice of the law, whereas
he has to worry about his future and, with but
few exceptions, live from hand to mouth. But
he must continue to play the role of the " ideal-
istic benefactor " unless he is to lose the esteem
of those who — stand outside.

Not long ago I read a fascinating description of
a " sanatorium." How within its walls fear
blanches the cheeks of the inmates, how Death
lurks behind the doors, how even the physicians
avoid speaking above a whisper and glide with
solemn and noiseless steps through the house of

44 THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE

pain ! Very pretty and sentimental ; but
utterly false, — as false as the observations of a
litterateur who stands outside can make it.
From within the thing looks quite different !
While the surgeon is scrubbing and sterilising
his hands someone is telling the latest joke, the
assistants converse lightly and merrily, not at
all as if a matter of life and death were going to
be decided in a few minutes. And it is well for
the patient that it is so. The surgeon and the
assistants need their poise ; they must not be
moved by timidity, fear, or sympathy — emotions
which cloud the judgment. Where one needs
all one's senses, there the heart must be silent.
The public feels this instinctively. I have
found that those physicians who practised their
profession in a plain matter of fact way, as a
business, were the most popular and the busiest.
And, on the other hand, I know learned phy-
sicians who are all soul, whom everybody
praises, esteems, heeds, but whom no one calls.
The more highly the physician values his
services, from a material point of view, the more
highly he is regarded as an idealist, and vice
versa.

That is how the idealism of the medical
profession looks in real life. For many physicians
their ideals are superfluous ballast. It often
takes years before they find the golden mean
between theory and practice, between ethics
and hard facts.

And how is it with other vocations ? In

THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE 45

every case in which it is possible to look behind
the curtains it will appear that the envious
natures of those who stand outside magnify the
advantages and overlook the unpleasant aspects.

All life is a continual game between hope and
fulfilment, between expectation and disappoint-
ment. And therein lies our good fortune — that
we can still be deceived. Were we in possession
of all truth and all knowledge, life would lose its
value and its charm. Only because, in a certain
sense, we all stand outside, because the fullness
of life and " the thing itself " will continue to be a
riddle, are we capable of continuing on our
journey and approaching erectly the valley of
death in which the shades dwell.

" Father, the show is over ! " A child's
sweet voice wakes me from my revery. Outside
I again look at the children still standing there
and staring with large, hungry eyes into the
Circus . . .

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO

Who can say when the first wish opens its
pious eyes in the child's soul ? The child
probably sleeps away the first few weeks of its
existence without a single wish, all its behaviour
being probably only manifestations of its in-
herited instincts. Suddenly the first wish
awakens and the humanization of the little
animal has begun. And with it begins the wild
succession of desires, mounting ever higher and
higher and finally aspiring even to the stars.
How few of the things we have been dreaming
of does life fulfil ! Wish after wish, stripped of
its purple mantle, sinks to the ground in a state
of " looped and windowed raggedness," till the
last wish of all — the longing for peace, eternal
peace — puts an end to the play.

Our childhood wishes determine our destiny.
They die only with our bodies. They go whirl-
ing through our dreams, are the masters of our
unconscious emotions, and determine the res-
onance of the most delicate oscillations of our
souls. It certainly seems worth while taking
a closer look at these wishes. Unfortunately
we are deprived of the best source of such
knowledge : the observation of ourselves.
For we forget so easily, and our earliest desires

(46)

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO 47

lie far behind us, hidden in thick mist. Only the
dream pierces the thick veil and brings us greet-
ings from a long forgotten era.

From the study of our children we can learn
of only one kind of desire. A desire that can be
easily observed, that the child betrays most
easily in the games it plays.

" And what are you going to be ? " That is
the question one most often puts to children
and which they very seldom allow to go un-
answered.

Right here we must draw a distinction between
boys and girls. The girl's first wish almost invari-
ably betrays the influence of the sexual instinct.
All little girls want to be " mothers " ; some
would be content with being " nurses." The
phylogenetic law of the biologist applies also
to desires. The desires of individual human
beings reproduce the evolution of mankind in
this regard. Just as, according to recent re-
searches (Ament), the first speech attempts of
children depict the primitive speech of man,
so the first wishes of human beings depict the
primitive wishes of humanity. Children's
wishes may therefore be said to be the childhood
wishes of humanity and to manifest unmistake-
ably the primitive instincts of the sexes.

The little girls want to become " mothers."
They play with dolls, rocking, fondling, and
petting them as if they were children. In this
way they betray their most elemental quali-
fication. My little daughter once said :

48 WHAT CHII,DREN ASPIRE TO

" Mother ! I want to be a mother, too, some day
and have babies." " I would be so unhappy if
I could not have any babies ! " Being asked
whether she would not like to be a doctor, she
replied : " Yes ! I would love to be a doctor* !
But only like mamma." That is, only the wife
of a doctor.

In marked contrast with this is the fact that
boys never wish to be fathers. That is : their
fathers are often enough their ideals and they
would like to be like them, to follow the same
profession or vocation. But it's only a matter
of vocation, not of family. I have never yet
heard a boy express a wish for children. There
is no doubt however, that there are boys who
like to play with dolls and whose whole being
has something of the feminine about it. They
have feminine instincts. They love to cook
and prefer to play with little girls. In the same
way one also encounters girls who are described
as " tomboys." These girls are wild, unruly,
disobedient, boisterous, and hke to play at
soldiers and robbers. One cannot go wrong
in concluding that a strong, perhaps even an
excessive homosexual element enters into their
psychic make-up. At any rate the biographies
of homosexuals invariably make mention of
these remarkable infantile traits. They are
boys with female souls and girls with a mas-
culine soul. Such boys may even manifest

*To understand what follows, the English reader should
know that the German word for a female physician (" Dok-
torin ") is also the titlt whereby a physician's wife is addressed.

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO 49

various disguised indications of the instinct
for race preservation.

The first stage of girlish wishes does not last
long. Usually the process of repression begins
rather early. The little girls notice that their
desires are a source of mirth to their elders, and
that their remarks evoke a kind of amused
though embarrassed smirking in the people
about them. So they begin to conceal and to
repress the nature of their desires and to disclose
only what is perfectly innocent. And they tell
us they want to become " maids of all work,"
housewives. That does not sound as bad as
wanting to be " mother." One can be a house-
wife without having children. As such they go
marketing, manage the home, cook, order the
servants about, etc. Then they are attracted
by the splendours of being a cook. A cook is
the goddess of sweets and delicacies and can cook
anything she likes. On the same egoistic
principle they then want to be store-keepers,
proprietresses of candy stores, pastry shops,
and ice cream parlours. As such they would have
at their sole disposal all the sweets and delicious
things a child's palate craves for. To possess
a store in which one can sell these wonderful
delicatessens and weigh them out to customers is
one of the most ardent wishes of little girls.

Of course as soon as they go to school a new
ideal begins to take possession of the childish
soul. Up there in her tribunal sits the teacher,
omniscient and omnipotent, invested with such

so WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO

authority that the parental authority pales into
insignificance in comparison with it. Parental
authority extends only to their children. But
the teacher's ! She has command over so many
children ! With sovereign munificence she dis-
tributes her gracious favours. She designates
one child to act as " monitor " (oh, what exalted
pre-eminence ! ) ; another may carry her books
home ; the third is permitted to restore the
stuffed owl into the teacher's cabinet, or to
clean the blackboard ; the fourth has the rare
privilege of being sent out to purchase the
teacher's ham sandwich ! And then there are
the various punishments the teacher can inflict
upon the children entrusted to her. Oh, it's
just grand to be a teacher !

But, above all, the desire is to rule over many.
Have I omitted to mention the " princess " ?
Incredible ! Only few children are so naive as
to betray this wish. But all would love to
become " queens," — ay, with all their hearts.
The fairy tales are full of them. How the proud
prince came and helped the poor girl mount his
steed, saying : " Now you'll sit by me and be
my Queen ! " Innumerable Cinderellas in the
north and in the south, in the east and in the
west, sit at their compulsory tasks and dream
of the prince who is to free them.

All have one secret dread : To be lost in the
vast multitude. They want to accomplish
something, want to stand out over the others.
Vanity causes more suffering than ambition.

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO 51

Soon, too soon, they learn that, these sober days
princes do not go roaming about promiscuously
as in the golden days of fairydom. But hope
finds a way and soars on the wings of fantasy
into the realm of the possible and yet wonderful.
Are there not queens in the world of arts ?
Do they not rule like real queens their willingly
humble subjects ? Haven't they everything
that a queen has : Gold, fame, honour, recognition,
admiration, envy ? Almost every girl goes
through this stage. She wants to become a
great artist. A prima donna such as the world
has never yet known ; a danseuse, who shall
have the tumultuous applause of houses filled
to the last seat ; a celebrated actress whose
finger-tips princes shall be permitted to kiss ;
a violinist whose bow shall sway the hearts of
men more than the golden sceptre of a queen
ever could.

This dream runs through the souls of all
girls. It yearly furnishes the art dragon with
thousands and thousands of victims. The
happy parents believe it is the voice of talent
crying imperatively to be heard. In reality
it is only the beginning of a harassing struggle
to get into the lime-light, a struggle that all
women wage with in exhaustible patience as
long as they live. And thus numberless amateur
female dilettanti vainly contend for the laurel
because they are so presumptuous as to try
to transform a childish dream into a waking
reahty.

52 WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO

It is even more interesting to make a survey
of what girls just past puberty do not wish to
become. Not one wants to marry. (Reasons
can always be found.) Not one wants to be
an ordinary merchant's wife. And life then
takes delight in bringing that to pass which
seemingly they did not wish . . .

In boys the matter is more complicated.
The sex-urge is not manifested so clearly in
them as in girls. It requires great skill in the
understanding of human conduct to discover
in the games that boys play the symbolic con-
nection with the natural impulses. It is re-
markable that boys' earliest ideals are employ-
ments that are in some way or other related to
locomotion. All little boys first want to be
drivers, conductors, chauffeurs, and the like.
Motion seems to fascinate the boy and to give
him more pleasure than anything else. A ride
in a street car or a bus which seems to us elders
so obviously wearisome is such a wonderful
thing for a child. Just look at the solemn
faces of the little boys as they sit astride the
brave wooden steed in the carousal ! " Sonny,
don't you like it ? Why aren't you laughing ? "
exclaims the astonished mother.

A child is still at that stage of development
when motion seems something wonderful. Is
it possible that in this a secret (unconscious)
sex-motive, such as is often felt by one when
being rocked or swung in a swinging boat,
does not play a part ? Many adults admit this

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO 53

well-known effect of riding. This is in all
probability one of the most potent and most
hidden roots of the passion for travelling. Freud
very frankly asserts in his " Contributions to
a sexual theory " that rhythmical motion gives
rise to pleasurable sensations in children.
" The jolting in a travelling wagon and sub-
sequently in a railway train has such a fascination
for older children that all children, at least all
boys, sometimes in their Hfe want to be con-
ductors and drivers. They show a curious in-
terest in everything connected with trains and
make these the nucleus of an exquisite system
of sexual symbolism."

Be this as it may. The fact is that all the
little ones want to become drivers of some ve-
hicle, that they can play driver, rider, chauffeur,
car, train, etc., for hours at a time, that in the
first years of their lives their fantasies are
fixed only on objects possessing the power of
motion, beginning with the baby-carriage and
ending with the aeroplane.

This stage lasts a variable period in different
children. In some cases up to puberty and
some even beyond this. I know boys who
have almost attained to manhood who are still
inordinately interested in automobiles and rail-
ways. In these cases we are deaHng with a
fixation of an infantile wish which will exercise
a decisive influence on the individual's whole
life. In most cases the first ideal loses its
glamour before the magic of a uniform. The

54 WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO

first uniform that a child sees daily is that of
the " letter-carrier." In his favour, too, is the
fact that he is always on the go, going from house
to house. The " policeman " too, promenading
up and down in his uniform, engages the child's
fantasy. So too the dashing " fireman."
Needless to say all these are very soon displaced
and wholly forgotten in favour of the " soldier."

The love to be a soldier has its origin in many
sources. Almost all boys pass through a period
when they want to be soldiers. The wish to be
a soldier is a compromise for various suppressed
wishes. A soldier has been known to become
a general and even a king. That fact is narrated
in fairy tales, chronicled in sagas and recorded
in history. One can manifest one's patriotism.
Then there is the beautiful coloured uniform
that the girls so love — and one is always going
somewhere. For one is never just an ordinary
soldier but a bold, dashing trooper, and — this
above all ! — one has a big powerful sword.
Under the influence of these childish desires
children plead to go to the military schools
and the parents give their consent in the belief
that it is the children's natural bent that speaks.
Why, I tried to take this step when I was fifteen
years old but — heaven be praised for it — was
found physically unfit. My more fortunate
friends who were accepted have for the most
part subsequently discovered that they had
erred in their youth.

The same thing happens with respect to the

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO 55

other wishes of children, whether they become
engineers, teachers, physicians, or ministers.
The voice of the heart is deceptive and rarely
betrays the individual's true gift. The bio-
graphies of great men may now and then give
indications of talent manifested in childhood.
But the contrary is also easily to be found.
Very often hidden desires are concealed or
masked behind one's choice of a calling. I
know a man who became a physician because
he longed to go far away, to go to the metropolis.
In youth he had to be driven to practice his
music — and yet music was his great talent
and he should have become a musician.

What our children want to become . . .
seldom denotes that they have a natural aptitude
for a particular calling. They are to be regarded
only as distorted symbols behind which the al-
most utterly insoluble puzzles of the child-
hood soul are concealed. When we are mature
enough to know what we really want to become
it is usually too late. Then we are children no
longer. But then we would love to be children
again and shed a furtive tear for the beautiful
childhood that's dead . . . If we could be
children again we'd know what we would like
to be. No illusory wish would then tempt
us from the right path, luring us like a will o' the
wisp into the morass of destruction.

And this wish too is fulfilled. We become
children again if we live long enough. But
then, alas ! our wishes have ceased to bloom.

56 WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO

Over the stubble-field of withered hopes we
totter to our inevitable destiny. Everything
seems futile, for all paths lead to one goal.
Then we know what children would Hke to
become, what they must become.

INDEPENDENCE

A pale, dark-complexioned young man,
elegantly attired, sits before me. His hair is
neatly parted on the side and boldly thrown
back over his forehead ; he is clearly half snob
and half artist ; in short, one of that remarkable
type of young man that is so common in a modern
metropoHs. His complaints are the customary
complaints of the modern neurotic. He is
tired and weak, incapable of prolonged mental
application. He is a clerk in an office, and has
already lost one position because of his inability
to use his brains any longer. With some
difficulty his father had secured a position for
him in a bank where a bright future seems to
await him but where a dull present bears him
down. All day it's nothing but figures, figures,
figures. He cannot endure that. His patience
is almost exhausted ; the figures swim before
his eyes, and he makes more mistakes than is
tolerable in an official of a bank. He begs me
for a certificate that will officially vouch for his
unendurable condition and make it possible for
him to resign from his office in an honourable
way before he is discharged for incompetence.

" Yes, and what will you do then ? Have
you another position in prospect ? "

(57)

S8 INDEPENDENCE

" Certainly," he replied, with a certain alacrity
which was in striking contrast with his careless
melancholy. " I want to make myself independ-
ent. I am not fitted for office work, and I can't
bear to be bossed around and instructed by every
Tom, Dick, or Harry who happens to have
been on the job a few years longer than I."

" Ah ! now I understand your inability to
figure. You are living in a state of permanent
psychic conflict. Because you have no desire
to work you cannot work. But what kind of
business do you wish to go into ? What have
you learned ? "

" Learned ? To tell the truth, only what
one learns in a trade school. I don't want
to go into business. I only want the cer-
tificate to show my father that my health
will not permit me to work in an office. Do you
think it's good for anybody to work from 9 a.m.
to 6 p.m., with only one hour for luncheon ? "

" That would be only eight hours work a day !
I assure you that there are thousands who woiild
be happy to work only so little. Shall you work
less when you are independent ? "

" Certainly. Then I won't have to work at
aU."

" So ! " I replied in amazement. " I am
curious to know what sort of business that is
where one doesn't have to work. What do
you intend to do when your father gives you
money ? "

A blissful smile passed over the interesting

INDEPENDENCE 59

youth's face like a beam of celestial light. ** I
know all about sports. Pm going to play the
races ! "

I must admit I was considerably taken aback.
I know how reluctant to work many a modern
man is whose whole energy is expended in dreams.
But that a sensible man should think of such a
thing was new to me. Such a peculiar motiva-
tion for the purpose of becoming independent.
The matter kept running through my head a
long time. I soon noticed that this youth was
only an extreme type of a very common species
— a species that expresses itself in a passion for
independence. When we investigate the deeper
causes of this passion we invariably find the
desire to secure for oneself the utmost amount
of pleasure from a very small investment.
But independence is only apparently the coveted
ideal ; behind it lies not only the desire for
freedom, not only the proud feeling of self-
reliance. No, in many cases the kernel of the
matter is — laziness.

Independence ! Proud, brazen word ! How
many sacrifices hast thou not demanded and
dost still demand daily ! Who is ignorant of
these little daily tragedies of which no newspaper
makes mention ! The salesman who, after he
had for years enjoyed a care-free and assured
position, has fallen a victim to the craving for
independence, and has to contend with cares and
worries so long that at last, broken down and
battered, he renounces his beautiful dream and

6o INDEPENDENCE

willingly submits his once proud neck to the
yoke ; the writer who starts his own newspaper
and sees his hard-saved gold flow away in
beautifully printed sheets ; the actor who be-
comes the director of his own company ; the
merchant who builds his own factory, — an endless
procession of men who wished to make themselves
independent.

It would be one-sided not to admit that in
addition to the aforementioned element of
wanting to make one's work easier there is also
a certain ambition to get ahead of one's neigh-
bours. Modern man is linked to life by a thousand
bonds. He is only a little screw in a vast machine
— a screw that has little or no influence on the
working efficacy of the compHcated apparatus,
that can be lightly thrown aside or replaced.
We all feel the burden of modern life, and in-
stinctively we all fret under it and work against
it. We long to sever the link that ties us to
commonplace day and to become the lever that
sets the machinery in motion.

Stupid beginning ! Hopeless and thankless !
Who can be independent and absolute nowadays?
Is there any calling that can boast of standing
outside life ? It is a delusive dream which
beckons and betrays us. We change masters
only. That's very simple. But we are far
from becoming independent thereby. We have
a hundred masters instead of one. The employee
who has made liimself " independent " has lost
his master but becomes the slave of innumerable

INDEPENDENCE 6i

new tyrants to whose wills he must bow : his
customers. Therein he resembles the so-called
free professions which are in reality not free.
The physician is dependent upon the whims of
his patients ; the lawyer woos the favour of
his clients ; the writer groans under the knout
of the cruelest of all tyrants : the public. And,
strange to say, it is this last calling that appeals
to most persons as the ideal of independence.
It is almost a weekly occurrence to see some
discontented youngster or an unhappy girl
with a thick manuscript in his or her portfolio,
begging to be recommended to some publisher
and thus open a writer's career to them. They
want to become self reliant, independent. It is
vain to point out to them that an author's bread
is not sweetened with the raisins of independence.
Others who have never written a line suddenly
make up their minds to become journalists.
They think that the will to become a journalist
is all that is needed to be so. Evidences of
adequate preparation and qualification they find
in the excellence of their school compositions.
They do not suspect that the journalist's in-
dependence is a myth that is credited only by
those who have never smelled to journalism.
That the journalist is the slave not only of the
public but also of the hour. That not a minute
of the day is his, and that he would gladly
exchange his pen for any other, more massy
tool, if such a thing were possible.
Dissatisfaction with one's calling is also one

62 INDEPENDENCE

of the factors that sets the feeling for independ-
ence in motion. Who is nowadays satisfied
with his calling, or with himself ? ! This may
be easily proved by referring to a striking
phenomenon. In doing so we need not sing the
praises of the " good old days." But happiness
in one's work and contentment with one's
calling were certainly much more common than
they are now. Otherwise it could never have
come to pass that the father's calling should be
transmitted to the sons generation after genera-
tion. How is it with us to-day ? The physician
cries : My son may be anything but a physician.
The public official : My son shall be more
fortunate than I ; under no circumstances
shall he be a public official. The actor : Be
what you will, my son, but not an artist ; art
is the bitterest bread. The merchant wants to
make a lawyer of his son, the lawyer a merchant,
etc.

We envy others because we are all dissatisfied
with ourselves and unhappy. The great
ideal that floats before our eyes is to become
a clipper of coupons. Money alone guarantees
the road to independence. But if we were to
ask the rich about this we would hear some
surprising things. I know a lady who possesses
a vast fortune and who is the absolute slave of
her money. I recommended her to take a trip
for her health's sake. She repHed : " Do you
think that I can go away for a week ? You
have no idea of all the work I have to do. Now

INDEPENDENCE 63

it's something with the bureau of taxes, now it's
engaging a new superintendent ! Then there
are the receptions ! I am busy from morning
till night." When I advised her to hire a
manager she laughed merrily : " Pd be in a fine
fix if I did that ! Then I would lose the only
recompense I have : my independence ! "

Wherever we look, the higher we go, the less
of true independence do we find. What does
the psychology of modern social feelings teach
us ? It shows us everywhere the same cry for
independence which in the single individual
we have described as the basic feeling of his
social attitude. Norway wanted its independ-
ence and got it. Hungary stormily clamoured
for independence. Ireland, Poland, Persia,
India, Egypt, and numerous colonies are strug-
gling for independence. In the structure of the
State the urge for independence begets continual
turmoil. Austria can sing a plaintive song as
to this. The demand of certain states for
autonomy is the outcome of the same motive.

Political tune — scurvy tune. However —
wholly unintentionally our analysis brings us
from the consideration of the individual to that
of the group. That a modern state can never
again attain that measure of independence
that it once enjoyed is as clear to the political
economist as to the sociologist. What we have
said of the individual applies also to peoples.

Must we then conclude that there is no in-
dependence ? Isn't it possible then for man to

64 INDEPENDENCE

elevate himself above his environment and take
a loftier point of view ?

There certainly is such a thing as independence.
But we must draw a sharp line of distinction
between two different kinds of independence.
There is an inner and an outer independence.
But it is only the inner independence that one
can hope to attain wholly. It alone is capable
of giving us that modicum of outward independ-
ence which may be laboriously wrested from
life. A healthy philosophy of life that frees the
spirit, makes renunciation easier and wishing
harder, and a certain spiritual and bodily
freedom from wanting for things, — these alone
can give us that independence that the world
affords. That is why the poorest of the poor
is more independent than the richest of the rich.

We all know the beautiful story of the king
whose physicians promised him health if he
could wear the shirt of a happy man. Mesengers
searched every corner of the world but, alas !
could not find a happy man, till finally they came
upon a merry hermit in the thickest part of a
dark forest who seemed to be perfectly happy.
But he, the only happy man in the wide world,
had no shirt !

We would have to divest ourselves of many
shirts to become independent within. We
wear and lug about with us numberless suits,
wrappings, which cover up our true selves and
apparently safeguard us, whereas in reality they
drag us down to the base earth. ^

JEALOUSY

Has any one counted the victims of jealousy ?
Daily a revolver cracks somewhere or other
because of jealousy ; daily a knife finds entrance
into a warm body ; daily some unhappy ones,
racked by jealousy and life-weary, sink into
fathomless depths. What are all the hideous
battles narrated by history when compared
with the endless slaughters caused by this
frightful passion ! It enslaves man as no other
passion does ; degrades him, humiliates him, and
makes him taste the hell of many other passions,
such as envy, mistrust, revengefulness, fear,
hate, anger, and poisons the meagre pleasure-
cup that imparts a touch of sweetness to bitter
life.

What is jealousy ? Whence flow its tribu-
taries ? Is this the Danaidean gift to humanity ?
Is it the twin sister of love ? Do we acquire it
or is it born with us ? It is surely worth while
to consider every one of these questions and to
attempt to determine the nature of this unholy
passion.

To understand jealousy we must go far, very
far back into the history of man's origin. Yes,
far beyond man, as far as the animal world !
For certain animals, intelligent animals, show

(65)

(6 JEALOUSY

clearly evidences of jealousy. Pet dogs resent
it if their masters pet another dog. They are
even jealous if the master caresses human beings.
There are dogs who begin to whine if their master
plays with or fondles his children. Very much
the same thing is told of cats. Who of us on
reading Freiligrath's gruesome ballad, " The
Lion's Bride," has not felt the terror of the
beast's furious jealousy ?

Our observation of animals has taught us
one of the fundamental characteristics of jealousy.
Animals know very definitely what is theirs.
They have a fine perception for what is theirs.
Most dogs snarl even at their masters if they
attempt to take their food from them. Their
jealousy is the mood in which they express their
possession, the egoism of their share. They
defend as their possession even the affection
to which they think themselves solely entitled.

The emotional life of the young shows the same
phenomenon. They too do not know the dis-
tinction between thine and mine. What they
happen to have in their hands is theirs and will
defend it with their weak powers and loud
howls. Many psychologists, including Percy,
Compayn6, Sully, Anfosse, Schion, Ziegler,
consider the child an unmitigated egoist. Even
in its love it is out and out egoistic and therefore
extremely jealous. Young children's jealousy
may attain an incredible degree of intensity.
A little two-year-old girl cried incessantly if
her mother took the baby brother in her arms.

JEALOUSY e^

A little boy was so jealous of his younger sister
that he used to pinch her leg at every oppor-
tunity ; having been smartly punished for it on
one occasion he spared the little girl thereafter,
but became afflicted with a peculiar compulsion
neurosis : he pinched the legs of adults. Such
experiences are of profound significance. They
give us a glimpse of the primitive times when
man had no idea yet of altruism. The whole
world was his as far as his power, his strength,
went. Man's jealousy developed out of this
primary ego-feeling, out of his right to sole
possession. Before man could be civilised this
tremendous barrier had to be overcome. The
first community, the first social beings, were the
first stages of altruism and civilization.

From this period emanate the subterranean
sources from which jealousy is fed. We have
probably all become more or less altruistic.
But always in conflict with ourselves, in conflict
with the beast, in conflict with the savage
within us. Even to this day the whole world
belongs to each one of us. Our desires extend
our property to infinity. What would we not
own ? What do we not desire ? The wealth
of the rich, the honour of the distinguished, the
triumphs of the artist, to say nothing of his
sexual triumphs. The less we can fulfil these
desires the more do we cling to what we have,
or, somewhat more accurately, could have had.
For jealousy does not concern only what one
actually possesses. Women may be jealous

68 JEALOUSY

of men they do not love and do not even possess.
They simply begrudge the other woman her
conquest. Don Juans know this very well.
The best way of conquering a woman is still
the old, old way : to make love to her friend.
In this case wounded vanity plays a part, of
course. But what is vanity but the over-
estimation of the Me, the striking emphasis
laid on one's own value ? And thus we again
come back to the root of all jealousy : the
pleasure in one's own possession, in one's
embellished egoism.

Jealousy need not always have a sexual
motive. A woman may be jealous of her
husband's friend because he has been more
successful than her husband. Her husband
is her possession. He ought to be the foremost,
he ought to have achieved the others' successes,
so that his fame should revert to her too.
Pupils are jealous of one another even though
not a trace of a sexual motive may be demon-
strable. We may be jealous of another's horses,
dogs, furniture, virtues, honours, friendships,
responsibilities, etc. Behind it there always
is our brutal egoism, the desire for another's
possessions, or at least the fear of losing one's
own possession.

Jealousy is generally regarded as a pre-
eminently feminine quality. Erroneously so.
It would be more nearly correct to say that the
heroic side of jealousy is to be found only in
men. It is not a matter merely of chance

JEALOUSY 69

that we have no feminine counterpart to Othello,
Herod and the Count in Hauptmann's " Griselda."
Jealousy in women has received a social valua-
tion from men ; it always has a smack of
the ridiculous, pathological, or unjustified.
It is a subject for satire, and is more often a
comedy motive than a tragic reproach. This
is due to the fact that woman's love is mono-
poHsed by men, whereas a man's loyalty is
demanded by most women but attained only
by very few. A man's infidelity is not a dramatic
reproach because it is a daily occurrence and
wholly in accord with the lax conception of the
majority. A woman's infidelity is an offence
against the sacred mandates imposed by — men.
And therefore the jealousy of a man — be the
subject of the passion a fool, a fop, an old man,
or some other laughable type destined for
cuckoldry — is a struggle for just possession,"
a conflict which always has an heroic effect,
whereas a woman's jealousy is always a dispute
for the sole possession of a man, a right which is
disputed by a great majority (namely, the men,
and even some women).

But there are men and women who are not
jealous even though they love intensely. And
with this we hit upon a second and important
root of jealousy. Only one who contemplates
an act of disloyalty against the object of his
jealousy, or who, as a result of doubts about his
own erotic powers, thinks he cannot gratify
that object can be jealous. Of course I am not

70 JEALOUSY

now speaking of justified jealousy based on facts,
but of baseless, unjustified jealousy. Whence
comes the suspicion that attributes infidelity
to the beloved being ? What is the driving
power in these cases ? Only the knowledge of
one's true nature. Only they can be jealous,
jealous without cause, who cannot guarantee
for themselves. In other words : jealousy is
the projection of one's own shortcomings upon
the beloved.

If we find a woman who is all her life torturing
her husband with her jealousy, complaining now
that he has been looking at some woman too
long, now that he stayed out too long, now that
he was too friendly with one of her friends, etc.,
then it is the woman who has seen the weakness
of her own character and who, in thought, is
guilty of every infidelity which she will not admit
even to herself. And in the same way faithless
husbands who love their wives make the most
jealous husbands. That is the vermuth potion
which leaves with them a bitter after-taste as
soon as they have made another conquest.
Their own experiences entitle them to be jealous.
Bachelors who had been philanderers and can
boast of many conquests usually marry plain
or unattractive women — alleging, by way of
explanation, that they want to have the woman
for themselves and not for others, meanwhile
forgetting how often they themselves had been
caught in the nets of homely women. For almost
any woman who will permit herself to do so

JEALOUSY 71

can find admirers, and ugliness is no protection
against dramatic or comic marital infidelities.
The absence of jealousy in cases of intense
affection usually, but not always, indicates a
nature immune against all assaults. But those
who are free from this passion need not there-
fore be puffed up. We are poor sinners all,
and the time may come sooner or later for any
of us in which we shall transfer our weaknesses
upon others and become jealous. But it also
happens that freedom from jealousy is a sign
not of security but of stupidity, unlimited
vanity. The woman is regarded as a paragon
of all the virtues, without a touch of frailty.
The husband may be an ideal specimen of an
otherwise frivolous species. In these cases one's
inadequacy is so covered up by our over-estima-
tion of our endowments that comparisons are
never instituted and projection is impossible.
, Consequently baseless jealousy and baseless
confidence will always be. And therefore we
shall not follow Bleuler in his estimation of
jealousy as one of the " unconscious common-
places " which makes love valueless as " the
plant-louse does the rose-bud." We shall
recognise in it, when it is baseless, a disease of
the soul occurring in persons whose cravings
and realities do not coincide and who have with
a heavy heart been forced to the recognition
after cruel inner conflicts that their virtue is
only an over-emphatic opposition to their
weakness. Their jealousy has taken on a patho-

72 JEALOUSY

logical (neurotic) character because of this re-
pression and this relegating of their own desires
into the unconscious. That is why all the logic
of realities is effectless when opposed to the logic
of the unconscious. One might almost say that
jealousy is a cultural disease which results from
the restrictions on our love-life imposed by law
and morality. If so-called " free love " ever
becomes a fact there will be far fewer cases of
jealousy than we have to-day. That sounds
plausible. But will life be more worth living
when there will be no more jealousy ? We
gladly put up with jealous-y if only our costly
treasure of love continues secure. Would a
life free from all jealousy and pain, a' life without
passions, be worth while f Is it not a fact that
our possessions are most highly valued by us
at the moment when we fear to lose them ? . . .
The sweetest harmonies are to be found only
in contrasts. The wagon of life rolls with
greater tempo over the endless lonely roads
when it is harnessed to the passions.

CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP

An indescribably sweet breeze blows over the
friendships of childhood. They are tender,
delicate, pale blue petals that tremble with each
stir of the childish soul and whose roots even
then already penetrate down to the deep layers
in which inherited instincts and tempting desires
fertilise the soil of the passions. Its first
friendship is a revelation for the child. Till
then it loved its parents, its surroundings, its
teacher. But behind this love the educational
tendency was always in evidence. " You must
love your parents because they are so good to
you. You must respect your teacher because
from him you get the knowledge that is indis-
pensable to you in your life." Thus we make
that love a duty for the child which ought, on
the contrary, to make it conscious of its duties.

How different it all is in the case of friendship.
Here the child can follow its natural inclinations.
Here it can choose according to its own standards
without having to listen to the dictates of its
educators. And indeed one has thousands of
opportunities to observe that a child is much
more cautious than adults in the selection of its
friends, that it will not accept a friend assigned
it by its parents unless he meets with its approval,

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74 CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP

unless an unconscious urge pleads in his behalf.

How peculiar children are in their choice of
a friend ! Either he is the nicest or the finest,
the quietest or the noisiest, the best or the worst,
the strongest or the weakest. They prefer one
whose traits are clearly and sharply defined,
rather than one who is neither one thing nor
the other. There must be something about the
friend that they can admire ; he must excel
them in something. But it is not a bar to
friendship that they excel the other in something.

Let no one say that it is an easy matter to
read the souls of children ! That their emotions
are simple, that their soul's an open book !
We can discover all the puzzling roots of love,
even in the friendships of children, e.g.^ sympathy,
cruelty, desire, humility, and subjection.

It is my belief that we adults cannot love
with the love we were capable of in childhood.
We cannot hate so, cannot be so resentful, and
cannot be so self-sacrificing. Alas ! even our
emotions become palHd with the years and can
make a show of colour only with the aid of memory.

Let us watch a child that has entered into a
close friendship. Is it not playing the same game
that we adults later on designate as love ?
Have we forgotten the feverish impatience
with which we awaited the hour of the friend's
coming and how jealous we were if he stopped
to converse with another ? How we hated him
then and how terribly unhappy we were ?
How we would have loved to cry aloud, if we

CTIILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP 75

had not been ashamed to betray such weakness.
Have we forgotten how the hours flew when we
were playing together, how we whispered dread-
ful and mysterious things to each other in the
twilight, how passionately we embraced each
other, and kissed, and how ready we were to
give up our little treasures to our friends ?
There is but one time that resembles this friend-
ship : — the time when a happy love makes a
wooer a sweet child again.

Even in a child's soul the hunger for love
cries aloud and will not be stilled. For a love
that is more than a love of parents, for a love
that is touched with that dark power which at a
later period shapes the life of man to its will.

Oh ! blessed time, in which our yearning for
a second human being is so easily gratified !
Blessed time, in which we do not yet feel the hot
breath of burning desires when the arm of a
beloved being entwines us, in which the threaten-
ing fist of Destiny does not pin us to the ground
at the moment when we think we are plucking
down the sky ! The mirror of our soul still
reflects pure innocence ; we do not yet suspect
that the passions that set the waters in motion
must also stir up the muddy ooze that lies at
the bottom.

Childhood friendship is the school of love.
Without such friendship the child is impover-
ished and forever loses the power to love. Look
at the mothers' darlings whose mothers took the
place of friends ! See how they are bound to

^e CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP

their mothers by all their emotions, by all the
bonds of their souls, incapable of breaking loose
from the love for the mother and founding
another generation. The stupidest dream
of parents is the wish to be the friends of their
children. But are we not deceiving ourselves \
Is such a thing possible ? Is there not between
ourselves and our children a world of disappoint-
ments and buried hopes ? Are there not here
yawning chasms in whose depths wild torrents
carry away the residue of past years, chasms
which cannot be bridged ? Say what we will,
only a child can be a child's friend !

And there is much food for reflection in this.
The child is surrounded by so much authority,
so much school, so much dignity, so much law,
that it would have to break down under the
weight of all these restraints if it were not saved
from such a fate by. meeting with a friend. In
secret conferences, at first in whispers and only
in hints, but subsequently more and more clearly
and distinctly, the road to life is outlined.
The gods are dethroned, or, at any rate, are not
feared so much ; little jokes about the teacher
are the beginning, and gradually the excess of
parental authority goes tumbling till it assumes
just proportions. The way to freedom of
thought, the way to independence, the way to
individuality is opened. What the child could
not have accomplished alone was a mere toy
with the help of another. And the friendship
grows ever prouder and more intimate the

CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP 77

more the child loses the feelings enforced upon it.
One great mystery, the child's eternal question,
occupies its mind more than most parents,
most persons, will believe : the question about
the origin of man, the question which is custom-
arily answered with a childish tale about a
stork (or a big tree in heaven, a large cabbage,
or a department store), a tale with which the
clever little ones make fools of their elders who
go on repeating for many years a story they had
long ago ceased to believe. Behind all the
child's curiosity there lurks the one great
question : " Where do children come from ? "
One will never go wrong in concluding that a
child who is plaguing his elders with a thousand
stupid and clever questions is suffering from a
kind of obsession, an obsessive questioning, be-
hind which lies the one great and important
question that troubles all children. On this
subject the child cannot speak with its parents.
Instinctively it feels that here is a great
mystery that is being withheld from it and
whose solution the parents have put off fox a
future time. It is during childhood friendship
and in connection with this question that
sexuality plays its first trump. It is a pity
that human beings so easily forget their own
childhood, else parents would not be so blind
in this regard. In the northern psychologist's,
Arne Gaborg's, best work " By Mama " there is
a wonderful scene copied direct from nature :
Two little girls are sitting on the basement

78 CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP

stairs whispering to each other their latest
bit of information about the great mystery ;
gradually it grows dark and an inexpHcable
dread of something great, threatening, mysteri-
ous, fills their trembling souls ; it is that fear
which faithfully accompanies love throughout
life and whose dark wing has just barely brushed
their innocent childhood.

The child gets older and friendship changes
its nature. Life and its claims interpose their
authority. Into the quiet and unselfish friend-
ship of childhood, into the pure and simple
childish harmonies there penetrate various
over- and under-tones whose inharmonious
character is not discovered until long after.
Envy, egoism, covetousness, cunning, distrust, —
all these feelings steal their way into the child-
hood friendship, and finally friendship degener-
ates into what Moebius has so aptly named
Phantom-practice. Young obstetricians train
their unskilled hands on " phantoms " (or
mannikins) to fit them for the serious require-
ments of their art. Something exactly like
this is the conduct of young adolescents, es-
pecially girls, who are still half-child and already
half-woman. To a girl the admiration of a
girl friend takes the place of a lover's wooing ;
to be kissed by her results in a dream of being
kissed by a man. Recently biology has developed
the idea, erroneously attributed to Otto
Weininger, that every human being is a mixture
of both sexes. Before puberty the two ele-

CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP 79

ments M, and F., male and female, must balance.
The child is bisexually constituted, and there-
fore every friendship is in a certain sense a love
affair. About the time of sexual maturity the
sexuaHty of every individual triumphantly
asserts itself. This is the great moment when
childhood friendship has fulfilled its mission.
It is as if the child were now freeing itself from
the yoke of its own sex and entering the arena
equipped for the battle of love.

This also explains why childhood friendships
so seldom are preserved and carried over into
adult life. The friendships of adults are based
upon different foundations. Now it is the
thinking, reflecting, conscious being who seeks
a fellow combatant who he hopes will fully
understand (and sympathise with) him. Higher
interests determine their friendships. But it
is no longer so deeply rooted as childhood
friendship. It no longer requires the co-
operation of the instinctive emotions.

Now and then one comes across persons who
are always children, whom not even the bitterest
experiences can strip of the pollen linked with
their emotions. They are the only ones capable
of true friendship even in their old age. They
spread friendship with the sweet smile of the
child ; they do not love for the sake of the
advantages to be derived ; they do not even ask
whether they are their friends' friend. Ah !
If we could be such a child again ! Or if we
could but find it !

EATING

I was once invited to the house of a certain
writer who had made a name for himself by
several very clever novels and had acquired a
fortune by the publication of a successful journal.
He was now living on an estate in the country,
retired from active life, spending his days in
luxurious peace. Much too soon, as I very
quickly found out. For he was in no sense
old. A man about fifty whose eyes still looked
challengingly at the world. His look had in it
nothing of the asceticism of one who is tired of
life. No ; here the fire of secret passions still
blazed ; here one could still detect power,
ambition, and desires.

Much in his conduct seemed puzzling to me.
A stony calm, a certain lassitude in his move-
ments,— an enforced pose calculated to conceal
the internal restlessness which his eyes could
not help betraying.

Only when the time to eat came he became all
life. Then he stretched his neck aloft, that he
might see clearly the dish that was being brought
in. His nostrils dilated as if the sooner to
inhale the delightful aroma. His mouth made
remarkable twitching movements and his tongue
moved over his thin lips with that peculiar

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EATING 8 1

rapid movement that one may observe in a woman
when she is engaged in animated conversation
with a man. He became restless, fidgetted
nervously in his chair, and followed tensely
the distribution of the food by his wife, a cor-
pulent, energetic and almost masculine woman,
who, very naturally and to his secret distress,
helped her guests first. Finally — much too
late to suit him — he received his portion.
First he regarded his food with the eye of an
expert, turning it from side to side with his
knife and fork. Then he cut off a small piece
and rolled it about in his mouth with audible
clucking and smacking of his tongue, let it rest
on his tongue awhile, his face the meantime
assuming an expression of visionary ecstasy.
It was easy to see that for him eating had be-
come the day's most important task. During
the meal he never stopped talking of the ex-
cellence of the food, all the while smacking his
tongue and lips, and literally expounding a
system of culinary criticism.

When finally, to my great relief, the grace
after dinner had been pronounced, I hoped at
last to be done with the wearying, unpleasant
chatter about eating. But this time I had
really reckoned without my host.

" What shall we serve our guests to-morrow,
my dear ? " the gourmand inquired of his
sterner half.

" To-morrow f The big white goose with the
black patch.".

82 EATING

" The big white goose with the black patch !
Ah ! She'll taste wonderful ! You don't know
how childishly happy it makes me. Come, let me
show you the white goose with the black patch ! "

Resistance was useless. I had to go into
the poultry-yard, where my host stopped in
front of a well-fed goose. " She'll make a fine
roast ! I am greatly pleased with this goose."

No matter what subject was discussed,
political, literary, or economic, the main motif
kept recurring : " I love to think of the big
white goose with the black patch ! "

The meaning of gourmandism then suddenly
flashed on me. What passions must this man
have suppressed, how much must he have re-
nounced, before his craving for pleasure had
found new delights in this roundabout way !
Behind this monomaniac delight in eating,
thought I, there must lurk a great secret.

And such was indeed the case. My amiable
host was really his wife's prisoner. While he
was residing in the capital he had begun to
indulge in a perversion. His vice grew on him
to such an extent that it threatened to destroy
everything, health, fortune, mind, ambition, per-
sonality, spirit, everything. There was nothing
left for him to do but to tell his wife all and
implore her assistance in saving him. The
virile woman soon hit on the only remedy.
He became her prisoner. They broke off all
relationships that bound them to their social
group. Most of the year they spent in the

EATING 83

country and lived in the city only two or three
winter months. The time was spent in eating
and card playing, to which fully half of the day
was devoted. He was never alone. At most
he was permitted to take a short walk in the
country. His wife had charge of the family
treasury, with which he had nothing to do.
Of course, this did not cure his pathological
craving, but it made gratification impossible.
And gradually there began to develop in him
the pleasure for delicate dishes. In this in-
direct way he satisfied a part of his sensuous
craving. Thus he transformed his passion.
His meals took the place of the hours spent in
the embraces of a lover. For him eating was
a re-coinage of his sexuaUty.

Is this an exceptional case, or is this phenome-
non the rule ? This is the first question that
forces itself on our attention. An answer to it
would take us into the deeps of the whole
sexual problem. But let us limit ourselves
for the present only to what is essential
for an answer to our immediate question.
Between hunger and love there is an endless
number of associations. The most important
is this : both are opposed by one counter-
impulse, namely, disgust. Both love and hunger
are desires to touch, (to incorporate or to be
incorporated with the desired object) ; disgust
is the fear of doing so. Love is accompanied
with a counter-impulse, a restraining influence,
which we call shame. But this very feeling,

84 EATING

shame, is manifested by certain primitive
peoples in connection with eating. In Tahiti,
says Cook, not even the members of the family
eat together, but eat seated several metres
apart and with their backs to one another.
The Warua, an African tribe, conceal their
faces with a cloth while they are drinking.
The Bakairi are innocent of any sense of shame in
connection with nakedness, but never eat
together.

The Viennese psychiatrist Freud, the English-
man Havelock Ellis (" The Sexual Impulse "),
and the Spanish Sociologist Solila, regard the
sucking of the breast by an infant as a kind of
sexual act which creates permanent associations
between hunger and love. And the language
we speak has coined certain turns of expression
which bring these connections out unmistakably
and which have great interest for us as fossilisa-
tions of primitive thought processes and as
rudiments of cannibalism. Note, for example,
the following expressions : "I could bite her " ;
or, " I love the child so I could eat it up ! "
But we express even disgust, aversion and
hatred in terms of eating, e.g,, " I can't stomach
the fellow," or, " he turns my stomach," " she
is not to my taste," etc.

On the other hand the names of certain
dishes reveal connections with other emotional
complexes than the pure pleasure of eating.
There is an everyday symbolism which we all
pass by blindly. Let him who has any interest

EATING 8s

in this subject read Rudolph Kleinpaul's book,
" Sprache ohne Worte " (Language without
Words). This symbolism plays a much more
important role than we are wont to admit.
For it alone is capable of interpreting the
puzzling names of the various delicacies on the
bill of fare. We are cannibals, for we eat
" Moors in their ' Jackets ' " (a fine revenge
on the tawny cannibals !) " poor knights,"
" master of the chase," " apprentice-locksmith,"
and many more of the same kind. " Bridal
roast " holds an important place in the menus of
the whole world. Social inferiority is compensated
for by numerous royal dishes . . . e.g.^ steak-
a-la-king, cutlet-a-la-king, chicken-a-la-king,
royal pudding, etc., etc. One who will take the
trouble, as Kleinpaul did in his '' Gastronomic
Fairy-tale," to follow up these things, will
discover many remarkable links with unconscious
ideas. We are really hemmed in on every side
by fairy tales . Every word we speak, every name
we utter, has its story. And the many fairy
tales in which children are devoured by wolves,
witches, man-eaters, and sea-monsters, together
with the tales in which so much is said about
man-eating cannibals, reveal to us a fragment
of our pre-historic past in which love and hate
actually resulted in persons being eaten. In
their naivete our children betray this very
clearly. When the little ones eat maccaroni,
noodles, or similar dishes, they often make
believe they are eating up somebody.

86 EATING

But, " something too much of this." Let us
turn our attention again to the epicures, the
little progeny of a great race. It is not difficult
to divide them into five classes according to
which one of the five senses is being chiefly
gratified during the eating process. First,
there are the ** Voyeurs," to use the term so
aptly coined by the French with reference to
a phenomenon in the sexual sphere. They must
" see " before they can enjoy. To see is the
important thing with them. The dishes must
be served neatly and must look inviting. They
are the admirers of the many-coloured adorn-
ments on patisserie, of torts, cakes, and puddings
built in the shape of houses, churches, towers,
animals, wedding-bells, etc. They reckon
their pleasures by the colour nuances of their
foods. Their chief delight is in the fore-pleasure
derived through the eyes. (This is clearly
implied in the popular phrase " a feast for the
eyes.")

Not quite as common are the listeners " who
are thrown into a mild ecstasy by the sizzling
of a roast, the cracking of dry crumbs, and the
fiz of certain liquids." Numberless are the
" smellers " whose sensitive noses drink in the
aroma of the foods as their chief delight, whereas
the eating, as such, is performed mechanically,
as an unavoidable adjunct. Such persons can
revel in the memories of a luscious dish, and
many of their associations are linked with the
olfactory organ. The pleasure in offensive

EATING 87

odours, such as arise from certain cheeses, garlic,
rarebits, and wild game is to some extent a
perversion nutritional instinct and betrays
innate relationships to sexual aberrations, as
are unequivocally indicated by certain popular
ditties and college songs. The folk-lore of all
nations teems with hints at such things.

An important group, the fourth, is that of the
" toucher." As we know the tongue of man is
the most important of the gustatory organs,
even though it has not that primacy and im-
portance which it has in many animals. Such
" touchers " derive their greatest pleasure
from the mere touching of the food with the
tongue. They prefer smooth and slippery foods,
e.g., oysters which they can suck down, and they
love to roll the food around in their mouths.
It goes without saying that these persons are
also " tasters," as indeed the majority of eaters
are. But for all that, these have their own
peculiar traits ; whereas the feeling of full-
ness or satiety is to many persons a kind of
discomfort, and a full stomach gives rise to a
disagreeably painful sensation, to these " touch-
ers " a full stomach means the most delightful
sensation the day has to offer.

Of the " gourmands " (literally " the relishers")
we need not say much. The whole world
knows them ; to describe them many words and
phrases have been coined, e.g. sweet-toothed,
cat-toothed, epicures, etc.

As might have been expected, these various

88 EATING

forms are often combined in one person, and your
genuine gourmand eats with all his senses.
We need only keep our eyes open at a restaurant
to observe that most persons show some trace
of epicurism. Very few resist the temptation
to follow the platter the waiter is carrying to
some table. (Almost every one likes to see
what his neighbour is eating.) We may be
discussing art, politics, love, or what not, yet
watch carefully how much the person serving
is taking for himself or dishing out for the
others, and how little he is leaving for us. Most
of the time in these cases we are the victims of an
optical deception. Our neighbour's portion
always seems bigger than ours. Hunger and
envy magnify the other person's portion and
minimise ours. And is it not an every-day
experience that we order what our neighbour is
eating ? " Waiter, what is that you served the
man over there ? Bring me the same ! "

How a person eats always reveals something
of his hidden personaHty. In the case of most
human beings at meals the same thing happens
that one may observe at the menagerie during
feeding-time: the peacefully reposing lion
becomes a beast of prey. That is why beautiful
women become ugly when they eat and lose
their charm, cease to become interesting when
they are seen eating. It is not a meaningless
custom that we honour distinguished persons
by dining them. By so doing we create a
situation in which there is no superiority and

EATING 89

in which we feel ourselves at one with the great
man and on a level with him.

Much more complicated than the psychology
of the ordinary eater is that of the gourmand,
who always seems even to himself to be an
exceptional kind of person and who has in un-
suspected ways enlarged the sphere of possible
pleasures. In most of these cases we shall find
that they are persons of whom life has demanded
many renunciations. Just as the habitual
drinker rarely stupifies himself because of the
pleasure he takes in drinking but mostly out
of a desire to drown in unconsciousness a
great pain, to draw the veil over some humilia-
tion, disillusionment, failure, or disappointment,
so the gourmand likewise compensates himself
for his lost world. He has the same right to
the pleasures of life that others have. Well
for him that he is capable of securing his portion
in this way !

Inexperienced humanitarians long for the
time when eating will be superfluous, when a
few pills of concentrated albumin combined
with a few drops of some essential ferment will
supply the necessary energy for ouf mental and
physical labours. What a stupid dream ! If
such a time ever came, how unhappy humanity
would be ! The most of mankind, truth compels
me to say, live only to eat. For them " eating "
is synonymous with " life." With the discovery
of such pills the wine of life would be drawn.
No ! No ! No ! If there were no such thing

90 EATING

as eating we should have to invent it to save
man from despairing. Eating enables one who
has suffered shipwreck on Life's voyage to with-
draw into a sphere which once meant the greatest
happiness to all human beings and still means it
to all animals. One takes refuge in the primal
instincts where one is safe and comfortable,
until Mother Earth again devours and assimilates
him before she awakes him to new life. We are
all eternal links in an unending chain of links.

And that is the whole meaning of eating :
life and death. Every bite we eat means a
quick death for myriads of living things. They
must die that we may live. And so we live
by death until our death gives life to others.

It's no mere accident that Don Juan is sum-
moned from the feast to his death.

ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS ?

There is no sharp dividing line between
health and disease. One shades off into the
other by imperceptible gradations. Disease
grows out of health organically. There are a
thousand transitions from the one to the other ;
a thousand fine threads link them together,
and often not even the best physicians can
determine where health ceases and disease
begins. As Feuchtersleben says, there is no
lyric leap in the epic of life. Nor do delusions
make their entry unheralded into a well ordered
mental life. Delusions slumber in all of us
and wait for their prey. The quiet normal
being is just as subject to them as the raving
maniac with rolling congested eyes. We need
only open our eyes understandingly upon the
bustle and tumult of life to be able to exclaim
with Hans Sachs : " Madness ! Everywhere
madness ! "

Every form of insanity, one may say, has a
physiological prototype. Melancholia takes for
its model the little depressive attacks of every-
day life ; mania has its prototype in the un-
restrained enthusiasm of the baseball " fan " ;
and even the various forms of paranoia, the
true insanity, have their typical representatives

(91)

92 ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS ?

among normal persons. To bring out this
kinship we need no better example than that
offered by the delusion of greatness. This
delusion is so bound up with the requirements
of the human psyche, so organically knit to-
gether with the ego, that it constitutes an
indispensable element of our ethical conscious-
ness. Every one of us thinks himself the wisest,
best, most conscientious, and so forth. Each
one thinks himself indispensable. It is this
delusional greatness of the normal person
which makes life tolerable under even the hardest
conditions. It gives us the strength to bear all
our humiliations, disappointments, failures, and
the " whips and scorns of time."

Of course we are very careful to conceal this
delusional greatness from the rest of the world.
We all have our secret chapels in which we offer
daily prayers and into which no one, not even
our nearest, is permitted even to glance. In this
chapel our idol sits enthroned, the prototype of
majesty, " our ego," before whom we bend our
knees in humble supplication. But out there —
in the world without — it is different. There
we play the role of the humble, respectful,
subservient fellow. We swear allegiance to
alien gods and mock our ego and its powers.

But sometimes the delusional greatness
breaks out with pathological elementary force.
We ought to keep our light under a bushel,
trudge along with the multitude, day in, day out.
Then all would be well. But destiny must not

ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS.? 93

lift us to heights where our behaviour cannot
escape observation and every one of our thoughts
will be deduced from our actions. Success
must not narcotise us to the extent of depriving
us of that vestige of self-criticism which we so
imperatively need in whatever situation life
may place us. Success does not pacify the
roaring of our megalomania. Success goads
it with a thousand lashes of the whip so that it
becomes restive and escapes from the security
of the preserves of the soul. Is this still a
healthy manifestation ? Or are we already
in the realm of the pathological ? Is it the
first delusion or the ultimate wisdom ?

The delusion of greatness penetrates whole
classes of humanity, infecting them like a
subtle poison against which there is almost no
immunity. We have only to refer to the
" affairs " of all kinds of artists of the first, second,
and third rank. The delusional greatness of the
artist usually appears along with the belittling
mania displayed by his confreres, his immediate
competitors. The higher we esteem ourselves,
the more we depreciate our fellow climbers.
That is the reason why the artist, drunk with
his own ego, loses the power to be just, to
measure the work of others by any but an ego-
centric standard. Should any one venture to
show this megalomania its true image in the
calm mirror of justice, he would be characterized
a malicious enemy. In the struggle to maintain
the hypertrophied ego-consciousness the delusion

94 ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS ?

of greatness is assisted by a willing servant :
the delusion of persecution.

Along with the artist class there are many
other vocations which to a certain extent
gratify the delusion of greatness. In some
callings this is a kind of ideaHstic compensation
for the poor material returns. The megalo-
mania of the Prussian officer, or the American
professor (w^ho are the butts of even the so-
called harmless comic-journals) is an example.
A close second to this is the megalomania of
certain exclusive student organizations, patriotic
megalomania, etc.

We can no longer escape a generalization.
We note that delusional greatness is a com-
pensation for some privation or hardship.
This is especially illuminating with reference to
that patriotic delusional greatness which has
nothing whatever to do with a wholly justifiable
self-consciousness. The self-consciousness of
the Briton emanates from his proud history
and the imposing power of his nation. But we
note that it is especially small nations, who ought
in reason to be very modest, who are guilty
of a tremendous self-overestimation. And
they do not scruple to invent an illustrious
past which is calculated to lend some show
of ^historic* justification for the national delusion.
Exempla sunt odiosa.

This mechanism teaches us how to estimate
folk-psychology. A people behaves like an
individual. So that our findings with reference

ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS ? 95

to the psychology of individuals may be applied
to whole races, and vice versa.

And here we note that the individual's de-
lusional greatness invariably has one and the
same root : it is an over-compensation for an
oppressive diminution of the ego-consciousness.
The daily life about us offers innumerable
proofs of this assertion. Persons particularly
prone to delusional greatness are those who
suffer from certain defects and who in youth
had been subjected to painful, derisive, scornful,
or depreciative criticism. Amongst these we
find especially the halt, the lame, the partly
blind, the stutterer, the humpbacked, the red-
haired, the sick, etc. — in short, persons with
some stigma. By the mechanism of over-
compensation such individuals may manifest
inordinately ambitious natures. Is it accidental
that so many celebrated generals — Caesar,
Napoleon, Prince Eugene, Radetzky — were of
small stature ? Was it not precisely this small-
ness of stature which furnished the driving
power that made them " great " ? Instead of
looking for the essence of genius in peculiar
bodily proportions (which Popper finds to be
in a long trunk and short legs !) it would prove
a more gratifying task to ferret out those primary
factors that have brought about an unusual
expenditure of psychic energy in one particular
direction.

A very brilliant and suggestive hypothesis
(advanced by Dr. Alfred Adler) attempts to

96 ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS ?

account for all superior human gifts as an over-
compensation for some original " inferiority."
Even if this principle may not prove true in
every case, it can be demonstrated to have
played a part in the development of many a
case of superior merit in some field of mental
endeavour. We are all familiar with largely
authentic anecdotes about distinguished scholars,
who have just managed to squeeze through
in their final professional examinations. In
their case, too, by over-compensation a con-
viction of their inferiority brought about a
heightened interest in their work and this interest
then became permanently fixed.

Unawares we have wandered from the delusion-
al greatness to true greatness. But who will
presume to decide what is true greatness and
what delusion ? How many discoverers and
inventors were ridiculed and their imposing
greatness stigmatized as delusion, and how many
intellectual ciphers rejoiced in the applause and
the worship of their contemporaries ! It is
this fact which encourages a megalomaniac to
permit the criticism of his contemporaries to
" fly by him as the idle wind which he respects
not." If it is not true that all greatness is
ignored, the opposite is true : every ignored
person is one of the great ones. At least he is
so to himself. Delusional greatness unites both
criticism and recognition in a single tremendous
ego-complex.

The roots of this delusion, as of all purely

ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS ? 97

psychic maladies, are infantile. There was a
time in the lives of all of us when we were the
victims of a genuinely pathological delusion of
greatness. In the days of our childhood we
were consumed by a longing to be " big." At
first it was only the desire to be a " big man,"
to be grown up. A little later and our desires
fluttered across the sea of our thoughts Hke sea-
gulls or flew like falcons into the unknown vast.
We were kings, ministers of state, princes,
ambassadors, generals, trapeze artists, con-
ductors, firemen, or even butlers.

And yet we are aU surprised when a butler
plants himself squarely before the door and
assumes the easy port of a person of some stand-
ing and identifies himself with the master of the
house and graciously dispenses his domestic
favours. Are we then, much better, more sensible,
or freer from prejudice ? We too stand before
the doors of our desires and act as if we believed
that they are realities which we are obliged to
guard.

RUNNING AWAY FROM THE HOME

Once more the physician felt the young
woman's pulse. *' But it's impossible : you
must not go out to-day ; you are running the
risk of a relapse. You stay in your beautiful
home that you have furnished so cosily, so
comfortably, and with such good taste. I have
no objection, however, to your inviting a few
friends, having a little music, chatting, gossiping,
but — stay home ! "

The pretty self-willed woman pursed her lips
at this and though her grimace was very be-
coming to her it seemed a little to vex her old
doctor who had known her from her infancy.
Somewhat irritated, he continued : —

" I don't just know what you mean by the
moue. Must I point out the dangers of exposing
yourself to a ' fresh cold ' ? Do you insist on
making a Sunday of every week-day ? First,
it's a cafe, then, a restaurant ! From a hot room
into the cold , moist, windy atmosphere of a
winter night ! "

" But staying home is so stale and unprofit-
able," wailed the young woman. " Home !
I'm home all the live-long week ! Sunday, one
wants a change ! I want to see human beings !
You are very disagreeable to day, Doctor ! "

{98^

RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME 99

The old doctor gently patted the young
woman's cheek. " Still the same self-willed,
obstinate child that will butt it's head against
the wall. Ah, you seem to have forgotten how
nice and sociable your parents' home was.
Those never-to-be-forgotten Sundays ! How
we used to congregate there, a group of intimates
— the young ones chatting and singing while
the older ones played cards, — and every Sunday
was a real holiday 1 And when things got a
little more lively, then young and old romped
together. Do you remember ? Now and then
someone would read us a new poem or the latest
novel. How we did enjoy those Sundays !
And how unforced and unconventional it all
was ! We would get our cup of tea or coffee
and were as happy as happy as could be. But the
things that are going on now seem to me, in my
role as physician, to be a kind of neurosis, a
something that I should call * the flight from
home ! ' "

" But, my dear doctor, must it be a neurosis ?
Is it necessary to brand everything as a disease ? "

" But it is a disease and its character as such
is very clearly established by this one element :
its compulsive character. The flight from the
home is a compulsive idea, that is, an idea against
which logic, persuasion, and appeals are of no
avail."

" I think you are going too far," replied the
young woman. " If I insist upon going to the caf6
to-day, I do it not because I do not like my home ;

100 RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME

no, I do it because at the caf6 I get a kind of
stimulation which I do not get at home. There
I can look through various journals and papers
that I cannot afford to have at home. I get a
chance to see friends and acquaintances whom
I could not receive at home so often. And the
main thing, at any rate for a young woman who
still wishes to please — and that, I am sure you
won't resent, you dear old psychologist ! —
the main thing is that there I see new people
and — am seen by them. I know that in return
I must put up with a few unpleasantnesses.
Yes, there is the stuffy and smoky atmosphere,
the continual din and noise, and so forth. But
I really do think that we moderns need these
things. We are not born to rest."

The physician shook his head.

" No ! Never ! You will pardon, I hope,
my telling you that yours is a very superficial
psychology and does not go down to the
heart of the problem. To the modern civilized
human being his home seems to be an extremely
disagreeable place. All his life he is fleeing from
his home, from his environment, and — yes ! —
even from himself. An inner restlessness, a
discontent that cannot be quenched, a nervous
stress permeates the people of our time. What
they possess seems to them stale, worthless.
What they pursued madly disappoints them when
they have attained it. They crave for change
because they do not know how to make the best
use of the present and of their possessions.

RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME loi

How else can we understand the phenomenon
that the whole world is happy to get away from
the home and those who are incapable of runn-
ing away long to do so ? For, I am sure if you
will give it careful thought you will confess
that you call ' experience ' only what happens
to you away from home. The days at home
don't count. Am I right ? "

" Only partly so, my dear doctor. It does
not tally with the facts — because nothing can
be experienced at home. And I would be only
too happy to receive my friends here daily, if
it were possible. Don't you know that servants
would rebel at it ? That they want to have
their day off ? That I must not expect them to
do such work as waiting on my guests every
Sunday ? Why even on week days the invita-
tion of guests causes a little rebellion in the
ordinary household ! "

" And why must there be invitations ? Must
your visitors always be guests ? Just look at
Paris ! There you may drop in on any of your
acquaintances after 9 p.m. You may or you
may not get a cup of tea. You chat a few
hours and then depart. With us that's im-
possible, because our so-called " Teas " have
assumed proportions which were formerly un-
known. You invite one to come and have tea
with you but instead of that you serve a luncheon
and make a veritable banquet of it, going to a
lot of trouble and expense, a course which must
have bad consequences."

I02 RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME

" Do you know, doctor, I think you are a
magician ! Its only conventional politeness
that makes us receive our guests cordially.
But you must serve your friends something
when you invite them for a little chat, mustn't
you ? "

" There you are again ! How beautifully
you chatter away so superficially ! No, my
dear ! Nowadays one no longer invites friends
to spend a pleasant time with them, but to show
them a new gown or to impress them with the
new furnishings. The main thing is to poison
the friend's peace of mind. If the guest's face
betrays all the colours of envy then the hostess
has attained the acme of delight. One might
almost say that their dissatisfaction with their
lot in life drives human beings on to stir up dis-
content in the hearts of others. This sowing
of dragon's teeth bears evil fruit. For at the
next ' tea ' the friend has a more beautiful
dress, perhaps some other new sensation, and
her husband's achievements and income mount
to supernatural heights, if one is to believe the
hostess' eloquent speeches. Finally, there is
no possibility of out-trumping her and there is
nothing left to do but, in a more moderate tone,
to fight out the rivalry on a neutral soil. The
restaurant or the cafe is this neutral soil."

" And what are your objections to this neutral
soil ? " , ,

" My objections ? The people lose the greatest
pleasure that they could derive from one another.

RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME 103

At home it must happen now and then that the
walls which separate the inmates from one another
fall, the wrappings that encase our inmost being
burst, and soul speaks to soul. At home it is
possible to devote the time to the nobler delights
that life has to offer. At one time there can
be — as there was in your own parents' home —
a reading, on another occasion singing or music.
And would it be such a terrible misfortune to
spend one's holiday with one's family, to be one
with them, reviewing the week that is past or
playing with the children and being a child again ?
Don't you see that you are giving up the gold of
home-life and pursuing the fool's-gold of pleasure
outside the home ? You do see it, you know I
am right, and a little voice within you implores
and pleads : * Stay home ! Stay home ! here
you are safe and comfortable ! ' But another
power, a power that is stronger than you, drives
you out, rushes you away from peace and
quiet to restlessness, and whirls you about.
And this whirl, you call * life.' What have
these empty pleasures to offer us ? What
inspiration for the work-a-day life do they leave
behind ? Is this anything less than just simply
kilHng the hours ? I don't want to spin out the
old stuff about the dangers of pleasures, getting
over-heated, catching cold, overtaxing one's
nervous energies, losing one's sleep, etc. As to
these things, I must admit, there is a great deal
of exaggeration. One ought not to fly from
pleasures. But they ought to serve as inspiring

104 RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME

exceptions to break, as it were, the day, just as
a trip does."

" But, my dear doctor, now you've caught
yourself in your own springe. Is not a trip a
flight from the home ? "

The young woman laughed hilariously. But
the doctor — now that he had assumed the role
of preacher — did not permit himself to be put
off or confused.

" Of course, the ordinary journey does belong
to my theme. A trip may, in fact, constitute
the crisis in our neurosis. A crisis that we must
all go through, for we all — I am sorry to say,
I too — suffer from this compulsive idea. As
after every other crisis the invalid is for a time
restored to health, so is it also after a trip.
But only for a short time. A few weeks — and
the compulsive idea is again manifest and the
flight from the home begins again."

" Come, now, doctor ! " interrupted the con-
valescent, " travelling is a necessity. As you
so aptly said, we want to break the monotony
of the day — to get out of the customary environ-
ment."

" That's just what I want to designate as the
chief symptom of the neurosis of our time.
Everyone wants to get away from the customary
environments. Everybody makes attempts at
flight. Whether they succeed depends upon
other social factors. Why is the customary
environment repugnant to you ? "

" Because I crave a change. I do not know

RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME 105

why. But I have an instinctive longing for it."
" There you have it, my dear. It's just as
I said : It's a compulsive idea. The flight from
one's environment, from one's home, from one's
furniture, is the same as the flight from one's
house. To me every piece of furniture that I
have used a long time has become so dear and
so much a part of myself that I do not like to
give them away and can only with difficulty
part with them. And if I were to come into
possession of a vast fortune to-day I cQuld not
renounce these dear associates to whom I am
bound by so many memories. With all their
shortcomings and modesty they are a thousand
times dearer to me than the most beautiful
English or secessionist furnishings. I'll confess
that in these matters I am not at all modern.
For the moderns are glad when they can change
something, and so they change their furniture,
their carpets, their pictures, etc. About every
ten years there is a change in the fashions and
your housewife cannot bear not to be in style.
One day you enter her house and you find new
rooms. And just as the furnishings in the house
are changed from time to time, so the residence
too must be changed frequently — in fact,
everything that can be changed is changed :
The servants, the family phsyician, the music
teacher, and, where it is possible, the husband
and even the wife."

The young woman reflected a little. " There
is much truth in what you say. It is in fact a

io6 RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME

tremendous flight that we see enacted every-
where about us, a flight from oneself and from
one's environment. If I were to judge by my
own feelings I should say that this fleeing has
its origin in our life's needs. We woman all
have a large ' Nora ' element in us and are
waiting for the ' miracle.' Inasmuch as we
cannot find it at home we look for it elsewhere.
Believe me, doctor, most women do not fall
because of sensual appetites. No ! they fall
because they crave for some experience. We
experience too little. The monotony of the days
asphyxiates us. And this great whirl of life,
this senseless running after a change — as you
call it — is only because our hearts are discontent-
ed, because our spirits are wrecked by the
monotony and insipidity of our lives. Do you
think that it will ever be different ? "

" Why not, pray ? Some day a great physic-
ian must arise, an apostle of human love, whose
voice will pierce the whirl and who will be capable
of opening man's stupid eyes : A new religion
would do it, a religion that would satisfy all of
humanity's longings, a religion of work and the
joy of life. Our time is ripe for a Messiah.
Whether he will come ."

" Ah, he has come," said the charming
young woman, her face beaming. ** For me
you are the Messiah of domesticity ! You have
cured me of my flight neurosis. I shall stay
home to-day, and as often as I can do so."

The old doctor took his leave with animated

RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME 107

steps. With the power of his words he had once
again reformed a human being.

But his joy was short-Hved. That afternoon,
as he walked by a cafe on the main thoroughfare
his eyes fell on a vivacious group within. And
there he saw his recalcitrant patient who had
evidently gone out only to get a chance to discuss
thoroughly with her friends the theme : " The
flight from the house."

DEAD-HEADS

" Are there any people who still pay for
tickets?" I was asked in all seriousness by a man,
who, as a result of his numerous connections,
had been able to develop the art of getting
passes to its utmost possibilities.

Ridiculous though the question may sound
to some, there is, nevertheless, something very
profound in it. The pursuit after passes is in
our day a favourite " sport " of residents of large
cities. To most such people a journalist or a
writer is not an artist who laboriously strives to
give adequate expression to his thoughts, who has
to listen to the secret voices within his breast
and to translate them into the language of every
day. No, in their mind a writer is the Croesus
of passes. He only sits in front of his desk,
as there accumulate before him green, blue, and
red tickets, the magic keys that open the doors
to all the temples of art without having to go to
the trouble of digging into his money bag and
experiencing the pleasure of paying out his
shining coins. And they take it ill of the Croesus
that he is so niggardly as to guard his treasures
so greedily and not make everybody he comes in
contact with happy by distributing the little
papers. For to them getting a pass is considered

{i»8)

DEAD-HEADS 109

a great piece of good fortune, almost like draw-
ing a grand small prize in a lottery. It enables
one to temporarily enjoy the greatest sensation
in life : pleasure without cost. That is, it
should so enable one.

With a pass one gets everything, — the respect
of the upper classes, the right to be rude and
the enforcement of courtesy. If it were possible
to say of certain young women that for a ride
they would part with their honour, then one
might aptly vary the phrase and say : for a
pass, with everything.

There are human beings, persons with so-
called " good connections," who lead a wonderful
life with the aid of passes. The physician who is
at their beck and call throughout the year is
compensated for his efforts by the presentation
from time to time of a box or a pair of seats for
the theatre. So, too, the lawyer. The Cerberus
rage of the most terrifying of all apartment-
house superintendents melts into the gentlest
humility at the prospect of a pass. We expect
a thousand little favours from our fellow-citizens
who assume the obligation to render these
favours by the acceptance of a pass.

There are probably only very few persons
who feel any shame on going on a trip with a
pass. These exceptional beings have not yet
discovered that nowadays it is only the person
who pays who is looked down upon. Every one
takes his hat off to the possessor of a pass.
The train conductor makes a respectful bow

no DEAD-HEADS

because he does not know whether the " dead-
head " is an officer of the company or some
other " big gun." The ticket collector does the
same because experience has taught him that
the dead-head usually overcomes by a treat the
social inferiority associated with " enjoyment
without payment." In short, a pass invests
its possessor with the mysterious air of a great
power and weaves about his head a halo which
lifts him above the misers plebs contribuens.

But you must not think that the possessor
of passes constitutes that part of the public that
is particularly grateful for and appreciative
of the artistic offerings. On the contrary !
Artistic enjoyment in the theatre requires a
certain capacity for illusion, and the purchase
of a ticket exercises a considerable influence on
this capacity. For one who has dearly paid
for his seat has imposed the moral obligation
upon himself to be entertained.

Down in his subliminal self there dwell forces
that may be said to have been lessoned to
applaud. The higher the price, the more pain-
fully the pleasure was purchased, the greater is
the willingness to be carried away by the work
of art and the artists. The poor student who
has stood for hours in front of the opera house
and been lucky enough to secure admission to
standing room in the gallery will have a better
time than his rich colleague down in the orchestra,
and a very much better time than the envied
possessor of a free seat. For his capacity for

DEAD-HEADS iii

illusion has been tremendously heightened.
He expects a reward commensurate with the
trouble he went to and the money he sacrificed.
His tension being much higher, the relaxation
of that tension must yield him a much greater
quantity of pleasure. The greater the restraints
that one has to overcome the greater the pleasure
in having succeeded in overcoming them.

The necessity for illusion is absent in the
possessor of a pass. There is nothing to make
it incumbent on him to be entertained ; he has
not paid anything. He can even leave the
performance before it is concluded if it does not
please him. He is more sceptical, more critical,
and less grateful.

Any dramatist who at a premUre would fill
the theatre with his good friends by giving them
passes would have little knowledge of human
nature ; certain failure would await him. Not
only because these so-called good friends, in
obedience to their unconscious envy, frankly
join the enemy's ranks, but because the possessors
of passes involuntarily get into the psychic
condition which is characteristic of " dead-
heads," viz : indifferent critical smugness and a
diminished capacity for illusion.

I know of a striking example of this that came
under my own observation. One of my friends,
a young playwright, invited his tailor and his
wife to go to his premiere, and not to be back-
ward in expressing their approval. He had
distributed a sufficiently large number of friends

112 DEAD-HEADS

in the orchestra, but the gallery had not been
provided for. He had, naturally, also sent two
tickets to one of his competitors. It so chanced
that I was in the thick of it, because I was
interested in seeing how the simple public would
receive the piece. I sat right behind the doughty
tailor couple, who, of course, did not know me.
Several times during the performance we almost
came to blows. The married couple hissed
with might and main, whereas I applauded with
all my power. We exchanged angry words and
otherwise acted in a manner characteristic of
such a situation and of such a youthful temper
as mine then was. The play was a failure.
Later we discussed the reason for this failure.
One said that the play was not deep enough
for the enlightened public. I challenged this
contention, and referred to the simple people
who sat in front of me and whose names and
station I had discovered from some neighbours.
My friend would not believe me at first until
I had convinced him by a detailed descrip-
tion of the couple that the tailor who had for
so many years made his clothes had felt it
incumbent on him to repay the author's gift of
a pass by contributing to the failure of his play.
To be under obligations always oppresses us.
We have the instinctive impulse to disregard
them. A pass is an obligation to acknowledge
the excellence of the offered entertainment, to
confirm that it is worth the price of admission.
In addition to the absence of a need for illusion

DEAD-HEADS 113

from material considerations we have to reckon
with the impulse to disregard this obligation.
These two psychic factors serve to bring about
in the heart of the possessor of a pass the defence
reaction that I have previously described.

Notwithstanding this, the craving for passes,
which formerly was the privilege of the few
exceptional personages, keeps growing more and
more, infecting other levels of society, and
would easily become a serious menace to the
directorate of the theatres if these had not hit
upon an adequate remedy in distributing passes
on the homoepathic principle. They fight the
" pass with the pass." They distribute passes
and reduced rate tickets very lavishly for the days
on which they know the receipts will be poor and
for plays which no longer draw large audiences.
The exaction of a small fee on the presenta-
tion of the coupon serves to cover part of the
running expenses ; the house is filled and the
many's fire for passes is quenched. On the
following days the people are much more willing
to buy their tickets because they think that they
can afford to be so extravagant, inasmuch as
they had seen one or more performances free or
practically so, and are swayed by the unconscious
instinct that a purchased pleasure is sure to prove
more delightful.

One would have to be a second limping
Mephisto to be able to follow the invisible
stream of passes in a large metropolis. The
romance of a pass is still to be written. It would

114 DEAD-HEADS

yield us an insight into the psychology of modem
man that would be second to none. It would
prove that one of the most important impulses of
our time is the desire not to have to work for one's
pleasures. I say " not to work for one's plea-
sures " rather than " not to pay for one's
pleasures," because money always means an
equivalent for our work. The most industrious
persons are in reality those who are most averse
to work. For behind their zeal to accummulate
money there is the burning desire to hoard up
as much as will ensure an income sufficient to
purchase enjoyment without additional work.
In the language of every day this would be :
a care-free old age. But, in sooth, worry is the
main source of our pleasures. Were there no
cares the variegated colours of the spectrum that
constitute the light of life would be replaced by
dull monotonous grays that resemble each
other as closely as the two links that unite the
two ends of a chain converting it into a whole.
The pursuit after passes is only a small frag-
ment of that mad pursuit after " pleasure
without work " that is being enacted all around
us. I have gone into the subject so minutely
only because it is a typical example of mankind's
stupid beginning to free itself from the
iron bonds of material dependence. For the
more free we think ourselves, the more enslaved
we really are.

IDENTIFICATION

I know a man who suffered a great deal
from his wife's moods. No matter how much he
tried he could never please her. If he was
happy and contented she called him " Mr.
Frivolous " and would say what a fine figure
he'd cut in a Punch and Judy show ; if, on the
contrary, cares troubled him and his face betrayed
his anxiety, she called him " Old Grouch " and
railed at him for making her Hfe bitter. If he
wanted to go to the theatre, she thought they
ought to stay home ; if he longed for the peace
of the home, she egged him on to take part in
all sorts of senseless pastimes. Is it any wonder
that the poor man became " nervous " ? that
he lost his peace of mind and his hitherto imper-
turbable good humour ?

In those painful days his comfort was his
quiet daughter who seemed to be in all respects
the opposite of her moody mother. He sought
sanctuary with her, and over and over again she
had to listen to his cries for peace.

Finally his nervous condition got so bad that
a physician had to be consulted. The physician
being fully aware of the patient's domestic
relations did not have to consider very long
and ordered the sick man to take a trip. More

("5)

ii6 IDENTIFICATION

easily prescribed than done. For our patient
had one very bad habit : he could not be alone.
It was a cruel punishment for him to have to
look after his small daily wants away from
home. What was he to do ? His wife would
gladly have gone along with him. But there
were numerous objections to that. Besides,
the wise physician would not hear of it. In this
quandary the distressed man thought of his
gentle, affectionate, young daughter. Every-
body rejoiced at this happy solution ; the anxious
physician, the jealous wife, and, not least, the
sensible daughter who had not yet seen anything
of the world and whose secret dreams of youth
had been disturbed by the erratic educational
methods of her mother, in which exaggerated
love and pitiless sternness alternated.

Great excitement marked the time for de-
parture. Mother changed her plans ten times
over. First she wanted to drop everything
and accompany her husband ; then she wanted
to induce the unhappy husband to give up the
trip, and so on. Finally the time for departure
arrived. They were on the platform at the
station and were saying the last good-byes.
Mother had an unlimited number of things to
say and suggestions to make. Then the con-
ductor gave the last warning and there was no
time to lose. Through the little window the
happy father and the still happier daughter
looked out on the source of their woes who had
been suddenly converted into an inexhaustible

IDENTIFICATION 117

fountain of tears. Was she so grieved because
the objects upon whom she was wont to project
the discontent of her unresting heart were gone ?
With a sudden movement she wiped away her
tears and called after her daughter in stentorian
tones : " Freda, now you'll take the place of
your mother ! Remember that ! " — What else
she said was lost in the din of the moving train
whose shrill whistle drowned the asthmatic
woman's commanding tones. During the next
few seconds they waved their last greetings
and then the scene so painful to all was over.

Father and daughter looked at each other,
their faces beaming. For a little while, at any
rate, they would be free and have nothing else
to do but to enjoy life. The mother's last
words rang in their ears. Involuntarily the
man smiled and remarked tenderly to his
daughter : " Well — I shall be curious to see
how my little sunshine will take her mother's
place." The little one looked at her father
seriously and replied : " Papa, I shall try to do
so to the best of my power, surely." And
deep within her she rejoiced at the thought
that strangers might think her really the young
wife of this fine-looking man.

After a few minutes Freda began to complain
that it was getting very cold. " There is a
draught ! It's terribly cold ! " The anxious
father at once closed the window. After a
little while she complained that the compart-
ment was unbearably stuffy. Why had not the

ii8 IDENTIFICATION

conductor assigned them a more spacious one ?
Had papa given him a tip ? She had been told
by a friend who had just returned from a wedding
trip in Italy that conductors are respectful and
accommodating only to those who give liberal
tips. She was not so inexperienced as a certain
papa seemed to think. If he gave the man the
tip they would surely be transferred to a more
comfortable car. Somewhat irritated, the father
complied with his daughter's wish. After
considerable trouble they were transferred from
their small cosy compartment in which they could
sit alone, to a large one into which a stout
elderly gentleman entered at the next station
and plumped himself down beside them. Freda
had an insurmountable repugnance to fat old
gentlemen. She reproached her father ; he
had not given the conductor a large enough
tip.

Why waste words ? After a few hours the
poor man saw only too clearly that his daughter
was bent on taking her mother's place in the
true sense of the word. She pestered him with
her moods and gave him not a minute's rest.
He tried to console himself with the thought that
Freda was not herself owing to the excitement
of the last few days, and that she would soon be
herself again. Vain hope ! The girl was as
if transformed. From a quiet, amiable child,
she had become a moody, fractious torment.
The trip which had been intended as a cure
became an unmitigable torture. For at home

IDENTIFICATION 119

he knew how to adapt himself quietly to his
wife's tyranny. But here, away from home,
he was constantly getting into all sorts of un-
pleasant situations. Finally, he pretended to
be too sick to continue the trip and after a few
days they returned home.

I have narrated this tragic-comical history
in such detail because it makes the meaning of
" Identification " clearer than any definition
could. What had happened to the young girl
to transform her so quickly ? Her mother had
enjoined her to take her place. She had to
some extent taken upon herself her mother's
duties. She identified herself with her mother.
She played the role of mother exactly as she had
for years seen it played at home, though, in
secret, she had disapproved of her mother's
conduct. This identification nullified her own
personality and replaced it with another.

This is a phenomenon that takes the most
suprising forms among the victims of hysteria.
But it would be erroneous to think that it occurs
only among hysterics. Almost all persons,
especially women, succumb to the seductive
power of identification. I wonder if it is because
of this that all of us secretly bear a measure of
neurosis with us throughout life ! At home,
Freda might have concealed her hysteria as a
kind of reaction to her mother's conduct. It
was only when she had to play the mother's
role that the neurosis, in consequence of an
unconscious affect, became manifest. It is

I20 IDENTIFICATION

thus that epidemics of hysteria break out.
If a neurosis is capable of transferring an affect,
it can arouse another, slumbering neurosis.
For to-day we know, from Bleuler's studies,
that suggestion is not the transference of an
idea but an affect.

The phenomenon that the above case brings
out so clearly and unequivocally may be seen
in everyday life behind various motives, catch-
words, tendencies, and strivings. Notwith-
standing these disguises the eye of the investigator
will not find it difficult to recognize the mechan-
ism of identification and the element of the
neurosis in the normal person. But if this is so
everybody is neurotic. Let us not get excited
about this conclusion. There is no such thing
as a normal human being. What we call disease
and abnormality are only the highest peaks of
a mountain chain that rises to various heights
above the sea-level of the normal. Every
person has his weak spots, physical and psy-
chical. We can reckon only relative heights,
never the absolute, inasmuch as a standard
of the normal is really never at our disposal.

There is no difficulty in finding illustrations
of the process of identification in the so-called
normal. Take, for example, the valet of the
nobleman. How thoroughly imbued he is with
his master's pride of ancestry ! With what
imperturbable scorn he looks down upon the
common rabble ! It never enters his mind that
he is one of the masses. He has no ghmmer of

IDENTIFICATION 121

appreciation of the absurdity of his airs, because
the mechanism of identification has clouded
his intellect and an emotion has strangled his
logic. He even gives verbal expression to his
feeling of identification. He seems to have
become fused into a unity with his master, for
he submerges his individuality, his ego, and on
every occasion speaks of " we " and " us."

" We are starting south to-day," he announces
to the neighbours. " We shall stay home," he
declares oracularly to visitors.

We see the same thing in the school child.
It takes a little time before he can free himself
from the influence of his teachers and of the
school. Not infrequently he cannot do so owing
to the permanent fixation of his identification
with them. Horace's " Jurare in verba magistri "
(i.e., to echo the sentiments of one's master) is
nothing but the result of a completely successful
identification. One who cannot free himself
from this affect and substitute for the confident
" we " of the school the uncertain " I " of
individuality can never hope to become an
independent personality.

Some feehngs, such as so-called party spirit,
pride of ancestry, solidarity, national pride,
etc., are only identifications. The German
identifies himself with his great national heroes,
e.g., Schiller, Goethe, Bismarck, etc., and is then
as proud of being a German as if that implied
that he had himself been responsible for their
great achievements. The well-known and almost

i2t IDENTIFICATION

ridiculous pride of the Englishman is only the
product of an extreme identification. But, as
a matter of fact, the British Government also
identifies itself with the humblest of its subjects
and protects him in whatever corner of the earth
he may happen to be. The officer who takes
great pride in his regiment, the pupil who is
all enthusiasm for the colours of his school,
and the ordinary citizen who can see no element
of goodness in any but his own political party,
all bear witness to the great power of identifica-
tion. It is in this way that socialism has become
such a tremendous power. Not because it
furnishes the proletariat with a dream of a
happier future, not because it has supplied it
with a religion. (The Church supplies this
want better.) No ! Only because it has
enabled the individual, the weak one, to. feel
himself one with a tremendous majority, to
identify himself with an organization that is
world-wide. Socialism is the triumph of iden-
tification and the death-knell of individualism.
The most beautiful instance of identification
is furnished by love. One who is in love has
completely identified himself with the beloved.
" Two souls with but a single thought ; two
hearts that beat as one." Has not Riickert
designated his beloved as his " better self " ?
(Or Kletke's very popular song : " What is
thine and what is mine ? ") A lover almost
literally transfers his whole ego into another's
soul. He projects all his yearning upon that

IDENTIFICATION itj

one object. He is oblivious of his mistakes
until the identification is over. Then the
intoxicating dream, too, is over.

With the aid of identification a lover can
transfer his passion upon any object that stands
in some sort of relationship to his beloved.
It is in this way that fetichism sometimes results.
That is why love for a woman so easily leads to
a love for her kindred. There is a Slavic pro-
verb which says : " He who loves his wife
also cherishes his mother-in-law." And, on
the other hand, a discontent with one's wife is
often concealed behind a stubborn hatred of
her relatives. In many instances the feeling
against mothers-in-law cannot be interpreted
in any other way.

Thus there runs through the soul of mankind
an endless chain of identifications ranging
from the normal to the pathological. The
child that puts its father's hat on its head
identifies itself with him just as certainly as
the lunatic who thinks himself Napoleon. Both
have realized their wishes. But there is this
difference between them : In the normal the
identification is held under control by the force
of facts, whereas in the lunatic the identification
has suffered a fixation. A delusion is frequently
only a wholly successful identification in the
interests of the desire to escape from painful
realities. Delusion and truth are plastic con-
ceptions. Who could presume to define where
truth ceases and delusion begins ? From

124 IDENTIFICATION

Schopenhauer's point of view our whole world-
philosophy might be said to be only a process
of identification. And truth is nothing but the
transference of our own limited knowledge upon
the outer world.

REFUGE IN DISEASE

The psychological study of disease is still,
alas ! a very young and immature science.
We have been held so long in the thrall of the
materialistic delusion of having to look for
bacilli and other micro-organisms behind all
diseases that we have almost wholly neglected
the psychic factor in disease. It now seems
that these psychic factors play the chief role
in the so-called " nervous " diseases, whereas
all the other " causes," namely, the predisposi-
tion, heredity, infection, etc., it now turns out,
do play a certain role, not an unimportant one,
it is true, but yet a secondary one. The influence
of emotional disturbance upon these diseases has
only recently received careful study.

We have learned that psychic causes may play
a great role in the occurrence and the prevention
of disease. We may confidently assert that
without the presence of a psychic component
which invokes the disease hardly a single case
of nervous disease could occur. Paradoxical
as this may sound it is nearer the truth than the
orthodox teachings of our day. For who does
not recollect times in his childhood when he
longed to be sick that he might not have to go
to school, and that he might at the same time

(123)

126 REFUGE IN DISEASE

be petted and indulged by his parents ? A
little of this infantilism persists with us through-
out Hfe. Hysterics especially are distinguished
by the infantiHsm of their thoughts, their feel-
ings, and their ideas. This being so, we must
agree with Bleuler when he asserts that the most
common cause of hysteria is the desire to take
refuge in disease. It will be of interest here
to reproduce Bleuler's report of one of his cases
(from his book on " affectivity, suggestibiHty,
and paranoia," published by Karl Marhold in
1906).

" A paterfamilias suffers an injury in a rail-
way accident. How terrible it would be if he
were so disabled that he could no longer provide
for his family and if he had to go through life
that way, suffering all the time, and half the time
unable to work ! How much better it would be
if he were dead or wholly disabled. His attorney
informs him that his annual earnings equal
the interest on 80,000 francs, and that he could
bring an action for that amount — a sum which
would insure his family against want for the rest
of their lives. Are there not indications enough
that he will need this sum \ Isn't it a fact that
he is already suffering from insomnia ? Work
fatigues him — his head aches — railway journeys
make him apprehensive and even cause attacks
of anxiety ; how helpful it would be, nay, how
absolutely necessary it would be, to prove that
he is very sick and to get that 80,000 francs !
And now the traumatic neurosis or psychosis is

REFUGE IN DISEASE 127

established, and will in all probability not be
curable until the lawsuit is satisfactorily settled."
Bleuler does not mince matters but roundly
asserts that in this case the wish caused
the neurosis. Would it be proper to call these
people malingerers ? By no means ! For,
naturally, all these wishes are not clearly known
to these individuals ; they suffer in good faith.
The wish emanates from unconscious levels.
Consciousness vehemently resents any imputation
of the thought of simulation. Such invalids
usually protest vehemently their desire to be
well. '* How happy would I be if only I had my
health ! Then I would gladly dispense with
damages ! "

Here I should like to report two cases from
my own experience which serve to illustrate
the refuge in disease even better than the case
described by the distinguished Swiss psychia-
trist. The first was a very sick woman who had
been bed-ridden for six years. No organic
malady could be discovered. The diagnosis
was hysteria. The deeper cause of her malady
was as follows : Her husband was a coarse,
brutal fellow, continually upbraiding her for
something or other and raising fearful rows ;
but when she was sick his whole nature underwent
a change. Then he became amiable, affectionate
and attentive. As soon as she was well he became
the old, unendurable, domestic tyrant. Finally,
there was nothing for this delicate, weak
woman to do but to take refuge in disease.

128 REFUGE IN DISEASE

Her limbs used to tremble and refuse their
function, so that she had to stay in bed or be
rolled about in an invalid chair. All the skill
of her physicians — and she had the best the
metropolis had to offer — proved unavailing.
Naturally the cure of such a case is hardly
possible unless one can remove the cause for the
refuge in disease. In this case this solution
was out of the question, and so the woman goes
on enjoying the blessed fruits of her invalidism,
complainingly but not unhappily, exulting within,
but miserable without.

Our everyday life furnishes numerous petty
examples of refuge in disease : the nervous wife
who breaks out in a hysterical crying spell if
her husband reproaches her ; the schoolboy
who complains of headache when he cannot get
his lessons done ; the husband who gets pains
in the stomach every time his wife makes life
unbearable ; — they all take refuge in disease
as a means of escape from their persecutor.
How often is this phenomenon observed among
soldiers, for whom a few days of illness means
the most delightful change ! In these cases
even the most experienced military physicians
often find it impossible to distinguish between
wish and reality.

A physician who does not know of the phe-
nomenon we have designated as " refuge in
disease " will be helpless in the handling of most
cases of hysteria. A blooming young girl had
for two years consulted specialists of the highest

REFUGE IN DISEASE 129

repute about the raging headaches with which
she was afflicted. All the usual remedies,
such as antipyrin, phenacetin, pyramidon, and
even morphine, failed to give her even sHght
temporary relief. The experts thought of a
tumor in the brain and of other dangerous
maladies as the possible cause of these obstinate
headaches. But it turned out that this headache,
too, was only a refuge in disease. A casual
remark of the father's betrayed the true nature
of the trouble : " My daughter is about to be
married ; she has been engaged for two years,
and the young man is anxiously waiting for the
wedding ; but I can't let her marry while she
is suffering from such a severe disease."

The headache was obviously the means of
getting out of a hateful marriage. Of course
one who would have been content with her first
story would never have discovered the truth.
What stories she told about her wonderful
love ! How ardently she loved her betrothed !
There was nothing she longed for more than the
wedding-day ! How unhappy she would be
if she lost him ! But a careful psychanalysis
brought forth ample and convincing comfirma-
tion of the above-mentioned suspicion. The
girl had been engaged once before ; in fact she
had not yet completely broken off her relations
with her former lover. In addition thereto
there were confessions about the death of all
erotic feelings during the second engagement,
as to which we cannot go into details. It was

130 REFUGE IN DISEASE

quite clear that her malady was a refuge in
invalidism. I advised breaking the engage-
ment. The advice was not followed. On the
contrary, the family hoped that a speedy marriage
might bring about a cure of the hysterical
condition. But the young woman is still going
about, complaining and whimpering, with her
malady (from which her husband, notwith-
standing his inexhaustible patience, suffers
more than she). Will she ever be well ? If
she ever learns to love her husband she may
recover her health. But where such powerful,
unconscious counter-impulses, such powerful in-
stincts, contend against an inclination, it is
scarcely possible that this inclination will de-
velop into full sovereignty of the soul.

What we have just said of the neurosis is
also true of the delusions of insanity. A de-
lusion also is a fleeing from this world into another
one in which some particular over-valued idea
represses all other ideas and dominates the mind.
It will not be long ere this conception will be
an accepted doctrine of all psychiatrists. For
the time being it is the common property of
creative literary artists, who, because of their
intuitive insight into human nature, have
frequently given expression to this idea. It is
perhaps most beautifully expressed by Georges
Rodenbach, the Flemish artist, unfortunately
too early deceased, who says in one of his fine
posthumous novels (" Die Erfiillung," Dresden,
190S) :—

REFUGE IN DISEASE 131

" The insane have nothing to complain of.
Often they achieve their purposes only in this
way. They become what they have longed for
and what they would otherwise nev-er have be-
come. They obtain the coveted goal and their
plans are fulfilled. They live what once they
dreamed. Their delusion is, to all intents and
purposes, their inner fruition, inasmuch as it
corresponds to their most ardent desires and their
most secret yearnings. Thus the ambitious one
ascends in his delusions the heights that have
beckoned to him ; he possesses endless treasures,
orders the destinies of great nations, and moves
only among the great rulers of the earth. Re-
ligious delusion brings its victim to the throne of
God and makes life in Paradise a tangible
reality. So that delusion always realises the
goal that each has longed for. It gratifies our
desires to the utmost limit. Sympathetically
it takes a hand in our affairs and completes the
altogether too pretentious destiny of those upon
whom fulfillment never smiles."

What a beautiful idea ! Delusion is a wish-
fulfilment exactly as the dream is. The mad-
house is the paradise of thoughts, the heaven
in which wishes meet with unHmited fulfilment.
And human beings sicken so often, and madness
increases with such uncanny rapidity, because
our most secret wishes are never gratified,
because in these dull times the miraculous
has died, and because life demands so much
renunciation and yields so little happiness.

132 REFUGE IN DISEASE

Let us draw these lessons from the foregoing
remarks : to keep one's desires within bounds
means to assure one's spiritual health. Inordinate
ambition, which foolish parents kindle in their
children's hearts, is often the cause of an early
breakdown. We must school ourselves and
our children to wish only for the attainable and
to attain our desires. Our ideals must live in
our breasts, not in the outer world. Then we
may find in ourselves what the world denies us.
They who can find refuge in their health will
escape having to take refuge in disease.

WHY WE TRAVEL

Why do we not know why we travel ? Haven't
we the imperative obHgation to recuperate ?
Does not our malady enforce a trip to a health
resort ? Are we not thirsty for new countries,
new people, a new environment ?

Peace ! peace ! No, we do not know ! Or
rather, we do not wish to know. Naturally,
we always have a few superficial motives at
our disposal when it suits us to mask our un-
conscious secrets from ourselves and from the
world. Why do we travel ? Psychologists have
given many reasons, but they do not go beyond
such superficial motives as " the desire for a
change," " a craving for excitement," " curios-
ity," " fatigue, the need for a rest," " flight
from the home," etc. Some go further and
attribute the desire to travel to the elementary
pleasure of being in motion. For these psycholo-
gists the little child's first step is its first journey,
the last step of the weary aged their last journey.
Others again veritably classify journeys and
distinguish between trips undertaken for health
reasons, business trips, scientific trips, etc.

Vain beginning ! In reality one trip is like
another. If we would understand the elementary
feelings associated with a trip we must go back

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134 WHY WE TRAVEL

to our youth. In youth we still have a sense
of the wonderful ; in youth the horizon of our
fantasies is aglow with wondrous visions.
But of course the world about us is solemn and
wearisome, full of duties and obligations. But
ah, the wide world without ! There dangerous
adventures smile alluringly ; there unrestrained
freedom beckons ; there deeds may be achieved
that may make kings of us. In our thoughts
we build a small skiff that will take us out of the
narrow channel of our homes into the vast sea ;
we battle on the prairie with the brave and
crafty Indians ; we seek out the sun-burned
gold-fields in the new world ; we put a hurried
girdle round about the earth, and — when at top
speed — we would even attempt a flight to the
moon.

Nothing that makes an impression on the
human mind is ever lost. Our youth with its
fantasies and childish desires exerts an important
influence on us all our life. Henceforth all our
excursions are journeys into the realm of youth.
All, all are alike. Life hems us in with innumer-
able obstacles, bonds, and walls. The older
we grow the greater becomes the weight that
loads us down. In the depths of the soul the
tintinnabulation of youth is ringing and speaking
to us of life and freedom, and keeps on ringing
alluringly till weary man surrenders and takes
a trip. The tinkling music of the soul works
strongest on the mind of youth. He, fortunate
he, knows not the difference between the music

WHY WE TRAVEL ijj

of his heart and the hum of the world without.
He knows not yet that the world is everywhere
the same, the people everywhere the same,
and the mountains, the lakes, the seas, with but
slight variations, the same. His longings
carry him out, far out, and he seeks their ful-
filment.

The adult lives a life of bitter disappointments.
He never seeks the new. He longs only to get
rid of the old. And the aged wanderer, having
reached the end of the vale of life, follows his
buried wishes, his memories of the beautiful
days in which there was still something to hope
for, in which he was not beyond self-deception.

It is not to be denied that ours is the travelling
age. This is partly due to the fact that we
experience so little, as we have already said,
in our craving for excitement. The many in-
ventions that have conquered time and space
have made it possible for us to fly over the whole
world, and thus the primary purpose of travell-
ing, the hunger for experience, shrinks into trivial,
merry or vexatious hotel adventures. But in
every such trip one may discover a deeply hidden
kernel of the voyages of the old Vikings. Every
journey is a tour of conquest. Here at home
we have found our level ; our neighbours know us
and have passed their irrevocable judgment
on our person. To travel means to conquer
the world anew, to make oneself respected and
esteemed. Every new touring acquaintance
must stand for a new conquest. We display all

136 WHY WE TRAVEL

our talents for which we no longer have any use
at home and all our almost rusty intellectual
weapons, our amiability, our courteousness,
our gallantry, are again taken out of the soul's
lumber chamber and put to use in conquering
new persons. This secret foolery compensates
us for all the plans of conquest that we have
long ago given up. To conquer persons without
having to depend on one's social background
is one of the greatest delights of travelling.
How strange ! As in ordinary life we seek
ourself and are overjoyed to find ourself in our
environment and get most out of the individual
who is most like ourself, so everywhere abroad
we seek our own home. How happy we are
on beholding a familiar face even though it be
that of a person who has been ever so unsympa-
thetic or indifferent. We are delighted with
him and greet him like a trusted friend— only
because he represents for us a fragment of our
home which we have been seeking out here and
which we have found, to some extent, in him.
That is why such discoveries make us happiest
as revealing identities with our home. Even in
this the infantile character of travelling is shown.
Just as in our youth we had to learn many
things that we had to forget subsequently so
we act with regard to our journeys ; every
new city, every new region is a kind of primer
whose fundamentals we have to make our own
no matter how much it goes against our grain to
do so. The faithful visiting of all the objects

WHY WE TRAVEL 137

of interest with our Baedeker in our hands,
the profound sense of an obHgation to have seen
so-and-so is clearly such an infantile trait and
has about it much of the youthfulness and
school-boyishness of the time in which the
teacher's authority meant compelling knowledge
to follow a set norm.

Much might be said about the technique of
travelling. The manner in which the thought
springs from the unconscious, gently and with
tender longing, takes on more definite shape and
apparently suddenly breaks out during the
night with the violence of a deed, presents
almost a neurotic picture, and one is justified,
from this point of view, in speaking of a " touring
neurosis." Every repression begets a com-
pulsive idea. The repression of the emotions of
youth begets a touring neurosis. The compulsion
is strongest in the first few days during which
difficult internal conflicts have to be overcome.
The threads that bind us to our home, our
vocation, and our beloved, must first be wholly
severed. This happens only after several days,
after the so-called " travel-reaction." That is
the name I would propose for that unpleasant
feeling that overcomes us after a few days.
Suddenly we feel lonesome and alone, curse the
desire that prompted us to leave our home,
and play with the idea whether it would not be
better to terminate the trip and go back home.
It is only when this reaction has been overcome,
when the confHct between the present and the

138 WHY WE TRAVEL

past has been decided in favour of the latter,
only then has one acquired the correct attitude
to travelling, an attitude which depends upon a
complete forgetting of our social and individual
obligations. It is, for all the world, as if after
this reaction we had suppressed all our relations
to our home and freed all our inhibitions. Only
then can we enjoy the pleasure of travelling,
but, alas, it lasts only a short time. For soon
there rises before our eyes, like a threatening
monster, the time when we must again resume our
obligations. The sense of duty gets stronger and
stronger, the desire for travelling gets weaker
and weaker, and after a short but decisive
conflict, the fever for travelling abates, leaving
behind it a little heap of ashes in which the feeble
coals of memory gradually die.

It is a profound feeling of bliss that we feel at
home, for down at the bottom of the heart we
have always been faithful to the home. We see
everything in the new colours with which our
journey has beautified the dull gray of daily
life ; alas ! they are only temporary joys,
borrowed harmonies, which lose their intensity
in the day's progress and are bound to return to
their former dulness.

Particular mention must be made of the
journeys of married couples. These, too, are trips
into the realm of youth, into the beautiful
country of the bethrothal period, and thus
every such trip is a new honeymoon. The
energies which had hitherto been devoted to

WHY WE TRAVEL 139

the discharge of their duties have now been
freed and burst powerfully into the amatory-
sphere ; but they may also intensify components
of aversion and hatred, and are just as likely to
emphasize antagonisms as, under circumstances,
they may build bridges over bottomless depths.
Inasmuch as en tour thought and feeling are domi-
nated by infantile traits, and inasmuch as to a
certain extent a new spring of love awakens
with the youthful fire and youthful tenderness,
a journey may — just because of these results —
result in disappointments such as cannot other-
wise be brought to light in staid old age.

Let us also make mention of the opportunity
a journey gives one of living a purely physical
existence, of enjoying the rare pleasure of
feeling oneself a creature of muscles, a thing all
backbone and little brain. Let us also mention
the delight of feeling oneself a stranger, of
shaking off every irritating constraint, of being
able to break with impunity the rules of pro-
priety and good breeding, and we have, in
comparison with all the really important psycho-
logical motives, touched only a small part of
the surface psychology of travelling.

And now I come to the really important
point of my thesis. What I have hitherto said
is of general validity, applying to the generality
of travelling people. But I believe that every
individual has also a secret, deep-lying motive
of which he himself is unaware and which one
rarely is in a position to discover. Now and then

I40 WHY WE TRAVEL

one may succeed in discovering such a motive
and one is then astonished at the strange things
that may be hidden behind the passion of
travelUng.

There are so many things that we seek all our
life and that, alas ! we can never find. One is
on the hunt for a friend who will " understand "
him ; another for a beloved whom he can
comprehend ; the third for a place where he
may find the people he has dreamed of. Which
of us has not his secret, dark desires and longings
which really belong to " the other one " within
us and not to the outer personage on whom the
sun shines ? What is denied us by the
environment may possibly be found somewhere
beyond. What withers here may bear luxuriant
blossoms somewhere beyond. . .

The deepest-lying, repressed desires are the
driving power in the fever for travelling. We
are infected — infected by the seeds that have
been slumbering within us for years and which
have now with mysterious power engendered
the ardour that drives us on to travel. Behind
every journey there lies a hidden motive. It
will, of course, be a difficult matter to discover
in every case this deeply hidden motive, this
innermost spring of action. In some cases one
succeeds, however, and lights upon most re-
markable things. One may hit upon some excit-
ing touring experience of earlier days, upon a
strange fantasy, upon some sweet wish that seems
to be too grotesque to be spoken of openly.

WHY WE TRAVEL 141

No one has yet fathomed just what constitutes
happiness. It is never the present, always the
future. A trip is a journey into the future,
a hunting after happiness.

The best Hght on the psychology of the
" touring neurosis " is thrown by a consideration
of the opposite phenomenon — the " fear of
travelling." There are many persons who are
afraid of every journey, for whom a railroad
trip is a torture, for whom going away from home
is a punishment. There are persons who have
compromised with the present and have given
up all hope of a future ; who have no happiness
to lose and therefore have no wish to achieve
any ; who fear any great change and who have
become wrapped up in themselves. They are
the great panegyrists of home, the enthusiastic
patriots, the contemners of everything foreign.
They behave exactly like the fox for whom the
grapes were too sour. Because their fears
won't let them travel they prove to themselves
and to the world at large that travelling is
nonsensical, that the city they live in is the best
of all places to live in. The fear of travelling
also has a hidden motive which not rarely is
fortified by justifiable and unjustifiable con-
sciousness of guilt. Why we do not travel is
often a much more interesting problem than why
we do travel.

Fear and desire are brother and sister and
emanate from the same primal depths. The
wish often converts to fear and fear to wish.

142 WHY WE TRAVEL

One who is incapable in his heart to fly from him-
self and his environment bears a heavy and
unbreakable chain within his soul. So do we
all. But we break it now and then. The future
may perhaps create free human beings. Then
there may perhaps be no abysms of the soul.
Just at present darkness surrounds us. The
mysteries of the soul are barred to us. Its
depths are unfathomable. Even if we have
illumined some hidden corner and brought
something that was long concealed to the light
of consciousness, it is only like a drop snatched
from the infinity of the ocean. The real reason
why we travel can be told us only by our " other
self," that " other one " whom we buried in
our remote youth. Whither we travel is quite
clear. Large and small, young and old, fools and
wise men — all journey to the realm of youth.
Life takes us into the kingdom of dreams,
and the dream takes us back again into life,
into that life to which we have been assigned
and to which our deepmost desires belong.
What desires ? Those are the secrets we anxiously
conceal from ourselves.

MOODY PERSONS

A beautiful warm summer day. The church-
yard lies dreamily in the sultry noonday
atmosphere. All nature seems to be possessed
by the desire to imitate the sleep of those interred
in the womb of earth. Suddenly there is heard
a grinding sound in the fine gravel and a curly,
rosy-cheeked, dark-haired lad is seen leaping
over hedges and over mounds after a gilded
butterfly . . .

Wondrous images loom up before me like
large great question marks in the trembling
air. Similar scenes from the distant mirage of
my own youth come to mind. Like a hot,
long-dammed-up stream my emotions break from
the unconsciousness into consciousness. I am
overcome by a long-forgotten yearning. Is not
my heart beating faster ? Is there not a wild
pleasure in the melancholy that oppresses me ?

How strange ! A little while ago I lay lost
in cheerful reflections in the tall grass, delighting
in the noiseless pace of time, and now I am ex-
cited, restless, disturbed, and sad, but not
unhappy. My mood has undergone a complete
change. What has brought this transformation
about ? Surely, only the appearance of the
beautiful boy who was trying to catch a butter-

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144 MOODY PERSONS

fly with his green net. Why did this scene
excite me so ? There must have been set up
in my mind a thinking process of which I was
not conscious. Some secret power that drives
the wheels of the emotions had set into action
a long-inhibited and hidden spring.

Gradually the shadowy thoughts came into
the bright light of comprehension. The boy
was to me a symbol of my life. An echo of my
distant youth. And the slumbering cemetery,
my inevitable future. My heart too is a cemetery.
Numberless buried hopes, too early slain, unblown
buds, longings goaded to death, unfulfilled
wishes lie buried here within and no cross
betrays their presence. And over all these
dead possibilities I, too, am chasing a gilded
butterfly. And when I catch it in my net
I seize it with my rude heavy hands, doing
violence to the delicate dust on its wings, and
throw the lusterless remainders among the
dead. Or it is destined to a place in a box,
transfixed with the fine needle named " impres-
sion " and constituting one of the collection
of dead butterflies which go to make up " mem-
ory."

It really was an " unconscious " thought,
then, that transformed my mood from dur into
molL And the truth dawns on me that all
our " incomprehensible " moods are logical and
that they must all have a secret psychic motiv-
ation. Moody persons are persons with whom
things are not in order. Their consciousness

MOODY PERSONS 145

is split up into numerous emotionally-toned
" complexes." An unconscious complex is like
a state within a state. A sovereign power, too
repressed, too weak, and too tightly fettered
to break into consciousness without having to
unmask, but strong enough to influence the
individual's conduct. Moody persons have
their good and their bad days. The bad days
are incomprehensible puzzles to them. Simple
souls speak of being under the influence of
demons ; poets share their pains with the rest
of the world and " sublimate " their petty
individual woes into a gigantic world-woe ;
commonplace souls place the responsibility for
their moods upon " nature," the bad weather,
the boss, the husband, or wife, their cook, their
employment, and what not.

In the grasp of an incomprehensible mood we
are ill at ease and anxious, very much like a
brave person who finds himself threatened in a
dark forest by a vindictive enemy whom he
cannot see. To muster up courage we deceive
ourselves, just as the little child that falteringly
proclaims : " Please, please ! I am good. The
bogey man won't come ! " But the bogey
man does come, for a certainty. He always
comes again because everything that is repressed
must take on the characteristics of a psychic
compulsion. If we do not want him to come
again we must bravely raise our eyelids and look
at him fixedly with eyes of understanding and
reaHse that he is nothing but a phantom of our

146 MOODY PERSONS

excited senses, that he does not exist and has
not existed. The bogey man cannot long endure
this penetrating look ; slowly he dissolves into
grey shadows and disappears for ever.

Modern psychologists have pointed out the
relationship between unmotived moods and the
periodical character of certain phenomena of
life. It is, of course, a fact that we are all
subject to certain partly known and partly un-
known periodical influences. But whether this
alone is sufficient reason for attacks of depression
does not seem to me to have been proved. My
own experiences speak against it. Just as a
stone, thrown into a body of water, causes the
appearance of broad circular ripples which
gradually get feebler and feebler until they
disappear with a scarcely perceptible undulation
of the surface, so does a strong impression
continue to work within us, giving rise to ever
wider but ever feebler circles. Only when these
circles set a floating mine in motion does the
water shoot up, the mud is thrown on high, and
the clear surface is muddied. These floating
mines are the split off, unconscious complexes.
The secret thought must not be put in motion.

But enough of metaphors ! Let us take an
example from our daily life. A women is
suffering from frequently-recurring incompre-
hensible depressions. She has everything that
a childish, spoiled heart can desire. And she is
not a spoiled child, for she had been a poor
seamstress when she made her husband's acquaint-

MOODY PERSONS 147

ance. Now she lives in a magnificent palace,
wears costly garments, has a houseful of servants,
adorns herself with the finest laces ; her husband
clothes her like a doll, pampers and coddles her,
treats her with the greatest affection — in short,
worships her. And this woman, the envy of her
associates as she rides by them in her splendid
automobile, has days on which she cries for
hours. Our first guess is she does not love her
husband. You are wrong, you psychologists of
the old school ! She does love her husband, she
is as happy with her finery and wealth as a
child with a toy ; she can assign no cause for
her melancholy.

Notwithstanding this, her depression was of
pyschic origin. When we investigated carefully
the experiences and excitements that ushered in
one of these attacks it became clear that sub-
terranean bridges led to secret (suppressed)
desires. Quite often the immediate occasion
was of a trifling nature. She had seen a poor
woman pass her in the street. Alone ? No —
with a young man, very happy, care-free, their
arms affectionately intertwined. On another
occasion she had been reading of a pair of lovers
who had drowned themselves. Suicide was a
subject, beyond all others, which she could not
bear to hear. At the theatre she once sat in a
box on the third tier. Suddenly she looked
down into the orchestra and was seized with
horror. That was a yawning abyss ! What if
her opera glass fell down there ! Or if she lost

148 MOODY PERSONS

her balance and toppled over ! A shudder
passed through her. She put the opera glass
aside and became greatly depressed.

The mystery surrounding her melancholy was
soon solved. Her husband, fifteen years her
senior, is not adapted to her temperamentally.
In secret she longs for a life rich in emotions,
full of sin and perhaps also of vice. Nature
probably intended her for a fast woman, not for
an eminently respectable lady. Alluring melodies
beckon her to the metropolis. She would rather
lose her breath in an endless dance in the tight
embrace of a pair of coarse arms than ride sedately
down the main avenue. She loves her husband,
but sometimes she hates him. He's the obstacle.
She knows how terribly jealous he is. He was
very sick once ; just then the wicked thought
entered her mind : " If he died now I'd be rich
and free ! " The reaction was not long in coming.
She saw herself as a dreadful sinner. Life had no
more interest for her. Since then she has been
suffering from periodical attacks of depression.

What happened in this case in the wake of
powerful repressions happens a little in all
moody persons. An unconscious motive for the
depression can always be demonstrated. In most
instances it is secret reproaches that provoke
the change in mood. In young people they are
the sequel of exaggerated warnings about not
injuring their health. Sins against religion and
morality. Reproaches for too readily yielding
to one's impulses. But also the opposite !

MOODY PERSONS 149

Many an attack of depression is nothing but the
expression of regret at having to be virtuous.

A girl suffers from violent (psychically), ap-
parently wholly unmotived crying spells. The
last one lasted half a day. I inquired whether
she had excited herself in some way. Had she
any reason for being depressed ? No ! Was
she sure ? A trifling matter — " of no particular
significance " — occurs to her. On one of the
city bridges a very elegant, young gentleman had
addressed her. Would she permit him to
accompany her ? Indignantly she repelled him.
What did he think she was ! But he persisted
in his role ; he painted in glowing colours the
delights of a rendezvous, till finally she found
the courage to exclaim : " If you do not leave
me at once, I shall call a policeman ! " Then,
flushed, bathed in perspiration, she rushed
home, ate her meal in silence and soon thereafter
gave vent to an almost unending crying spell.

And now I discover that her first attack of
crying followed a similar occurrence. She was
coming home from the country and had to travel
at night. She asked the conductor to point
out the ladies' coupe. To her horror a tall,
blonde lieutenant entered her coupe at the next
station. She at once protested vigorously at the
intrusion. The officer very politely offered his
apologies, explaining that the train was full and
that he would be quite satisfied with a modest
corner. He would be greatly obliged to her for
her kindness. But so anxious was she about her

150 MOODY PERSONS

virtue that she was proof against his entreaties.
She appealed to the conductor and insisted on
her rights. The spruce officer had to leave the
coupe and for the rest of the night she was not
molested. But the occurrence had so excited
her that she could not fall asleep and she lay
awake till dawn. The following day she had the
first attack of depression and crying. She be-
wailed her cruel fate that compelled her to be
virtuous while all the hidden voices within
clamoured for a gay life. She did not find
herself strong enough to conquer her ethical
inhibitions. She was too weak to sin and not
strong enough to be really virtuous.

I could cite many such examples. They all
show convincingly that there are no " inexplic-
able " psychic depressions, that consciousness
does not embrace all the psychic forces that
govern and direct us.

The classification of human beings into those
that are free and those that are not was deter-
mined by a social or ethical canon. But in
reality most human beings are the slaves of
their unconscious complexes. Only he can be
free who knows himself thoroughly, who has
dared to look unafraid into the frightful depths of
the unconscious. Most persons are under the
yoke of their " other self " who, with his biting
whip, drives them to pains and to pleasures,
compels them to leave the table of life and goads
them into the arms of crime.

The greatest happiness in life is to have

MOODY PERSONS 151

achieved one's inner freedom. This thought is
still expressed in an old aphorism. " Everyone
may have his moods ; but his moods must not
have him."

Moody persons are the slaves of their past,
masters of renunciation and assuredly bunglers in
the art of life. Their only salvation is in learning
the truth or in the art of transforming their de-
pression into works of art. Most of the time
they glide through life's turbulence like dreamers.
Their ears are turned inward and thus it comes
about that life's call is perceived but faintly by
them. They are chasing butterflies in ceme-
teries. . .

OVERVALUED IDEAS

Ideas resemble coins which have a certain
exchange value according to written and un-
written laws. Some are copper coins, so defaced
and dirty that no one would suspect from their
looks that they had once sparkled like bright
gold. Others shine even to-day, after a lapse of
a thousand years, and a commanding figure
proudly proclaims its origin. One might even
more aptly say that ideas resemble securities
that are highly valued to-day and may be
worthless to-morrow ; one day they promise
their possessor wealth and fame, and the next
day there comes a spiritual break, he is impover-
ished, and is left with an apparently worthless
piece of paper. . .

There is as yet, alas ! no standard by which
the values of different ideas might be measured.
Every man constructs for himself without much
ado a canon whereby to value his own thoughts.
As a rule he swims with the tide of current
opinion ; more rarely he goes with the minority
and very rarely he independently makes his
own measure wherewith to judge matters.
Strange ! In the end the conflict of minds
turns altogether about ideas and their estimation.
What else do geniuses, the pathfinders of man-
kind, accomplish but to disseminate a hitherto
neglected or even unknown idea and cause it to

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OVERVALUED IDEAS 153

be generally accepted or to cause ideas that have
hitherto stood high in the world's estimation
to topple from their thrones ?

Just as everything else in life runs a circuitous
course, in which beginning and end touch, so is it
also with the valuation of ideas. Not only the
genius, but the fool also strips old, highly esteem-
ed ideas and overvalues others that he has
created for himself. The genius and the fool
agree in that they permit themselves to be led
by the " overvaluation " of their ideas. This
expression was coined in a happy moment by the
psychiatrist Wernicke. It tells more in its
pregnant brevity than a long-winded definition
would. Formerly it was the custom to speak of
the " fixed ideas " of the sufferers from the
peculiar form of insanity which physicians call
" paranoia," the mental disease which the
laiety knows better and understands less than
any other psychosis. A delusion was regarded
as a fixed idea which neither experience nor
logic could shake. To-day we have penetrated
deeper into the problems of delusions. We
know that ideas differ from one another tremend-
ously. Some are anemic and colourless, come like
pale shadows and so depart. Others have flesh
and blood and scintillate in brilliant colours. Long
after they have vanished, their image still trembles
in our souls in gently dying oscillations. The
explanation for this phenomenon is very simple.
Our attention is dependent upon our emotions.
Pale thoughts are indifferent and have no em-

154 OVERVALUED IDEAS

phasis. Coloured ideas are richly endowed with
emotions, being either pleasurable or painful.

As a rule ideas are in continual conflict with
one another. The instincts surge upward from
the depth, the inhibitions bear down from above,
and between them — owing to stimuli from within
and without — the sea of ideas rocks up and down,
during which time another idea rises to the
mirror-like surface of consciousness. Suddenly-
one remains on top and becomes stationary,
like a buoy anchored deep to the sea's bottom.
This is the " fixed idea " of older writers and the
" overvalued ideas " of modern psychother-
apeutists.

This idea is really deeply anchored. At the
bottom of the unconscious lie the great " com-
plexes " which impart a corresponding accent to
our various ideas. An overvalued idea is
anchored in a " complex " which has repressed
all other " complexes." It is accompanied or
invested with a powerful affect which has
stripped other ideas of their affects.

A very old example — if one may so call it —
of physiological insanity is the condition
known as " being in love." A German psychia-
trist has taken the wholly supererogatory pains
to prove anew that a lover is a kind of madman
and he designates love as " physiological para-
noia." But, unfortunately, he makes no distinc-
tion between loving and being in love. But it
is just through this distinction that we are
enabled precisely to define the conception of an

OVERVALUED IDEAS 155

overvalued idea. Like an example from a
text-book. For love is an idea whose value is
generally acknowledged. We love our parents,
our teacher, our country, art, our friends, etc.

But as regards being in love it is quite a differ-
ent matter. As to this the environment does not
accept the exaggerated valuation of the emotions.
Here love becomes an overvalued idea. Arguing
with one who is in love about common sense,
religion, education, station, or politics will not
affect him in the least. He is dominated
solely by the love-complex. This alone deter-
mines the resonance of his thoughts and feelings.
The attraction to the chosen object has attracted
all the other affects to it, has placed all the
impulses at the service of one overvalued idea.
He loves life but only if he be together with his
beloved ; he is jealous, but only with reference
to the love-object ; he is interested only in such
matters as are in some way related to that
object. The fool who is being dominated by an
overvalued idea acts exactly in the same way.
The lunatic who imagines himself the king of the
world, and in whom a childhood wish had over-
poweringly established itself as a fact in his
consciousness, has interest only for such things
as find access to this wish ; the victim of ideas
of persecution discovers in the news items of the
daily papers the important communication that
his enemies are laying traps for him ; the un-
fortunate love-sick youth who imagines that
Princess X wants to give him her hand in marriage

iS6 OVERVALUED IDEAS

sees in all sorts of advertisements of love-hungry
ladies secret communications from his princess.

These poor fools bring everything they see and
everything they feel into relationship with the
overvalued idea which, projected outward in the
shape of an hallucination, sounds to their ears
like a spiritual echo and blinds their eyes like a
vision.

A lover acts essentially like this. That is
why the world says of a person in love that he
makes himself ridiculous. A handkerchief or a
glove, or anything belonging to the beloved,
becomes a fetich which can evoke the most
ecstatic emotions. Anything that can be
associated with love is overvalued.

Another question involuntarily presents itself.
Is love, in the form known as " being in love,"
the only overvalued idea with which a normal
person may be afflicted ? Are there any other
forms of " physiological insanity " — if we may
use the term coined by Lower and subsequently
imitated by Moebius ?

The answer to these questions is not difficult.
A backward look teaches us what unspeakable
evils overvalued ideas have wrought in man's
history. For overvalued ideas are sources of
great danger. They are richly endowed with
emotions and consequently lend themselves to
suggestion more readily than almost any other idea.
Bleuler has proved that suggestion is nothing
but the transference of an emotion. And such
overvalued ideas can be hurled with great

OVERVALUED IDEAS 157

suggestive force among the multitude and change
the individual — and even whole communities —
into a fool. That is how the psychoses of whole
nations have arisen. The tremendous power of
overvalued ideas can be understood if one thinks
of the crusades, the witchcraft persecutions,
hysterical epidemics, the Dreyfus affair, anarch-
ism, etc.

It is a sad fact that none of us can be free from
overvalued ideas. In this sense there is really
no difference between fools and healthy persons.
Everyone of us bears within himself a hidden
quantity of neurosis and psychosis. What
saves us from the insane asylum is perhaps only
the circumstance that we hide our overvalued
ideas or that so many persons share our folly
and that the multitude accepts it as wisdom.

There are innumerable aphorisms, the crystal-
lised precipitations of thousands of years, exper-
ience, that express this truth. " Every man has
his little crack, his dross and his sliver." (In the
German saying the overvalued idea is compared
to a splinter in the brain. An excellent mata-
phor !) "If you see a fool take hold of your own
ears." '* You cannot name a wise man who was
not guilty of some folly." (The reader will find
ample material on this subject in Dr. Moenken-
moller's book on * mental disease and mental
weakness in satire, proverb, and humour,' pub-
lished in 1907.) In other words : We all suffer
from a false and subjective valuation of our ideas.
We all drag overvalued ideas about with us.

iS8 OVERVALUED IDEAS

It is the dream of all great minds to revise
these overvalued ideas. Nietzsche's life work
was a struggle with overvalued ideas. While so
engaged, he himself became the victim of an
overvalued idea, and his superman will forever
remain a literary myth. But if the twilight of
Gods could once set in for the overvalued ideas
then only could we do full justice to his rhapsod-
ies in " Beyond Good and Evil." For in no
other sphere is there such luxuriance of over-
valued ideas as in the ethical. All progress has
been brought about by the suppression of the
natural impulses. All our education, using the
word in its true sense, consists in investing our
instincts and impulses with dont's. The sum
total of these inhibitions we call moralitv.
Progress consists in getting pleasure out of the
inhibition, in converting the displeasure of being
inhibited into ethical pleasure. The striving for
this goal results in a kind of ethical burdening.
One who has had the opportunity to study
neurotics will be amazed at the many agoniz-
ing conscious pangs they suffer from owing to
their ignorance of man's true nature. These
times pant under the burden of morality as an
overvalued idea. They are in danger of asphyx-
iating under the ethical burden. A false and
hypocritical morality, by disseminating an un-
healthy conception of our dispositions (instincts),
has turned our views on what constitutes sin
topsy-turvy. The consequences are only too
evident. On the one hand, we behold, as

OVERVALUED IDEAS 159

evidences of suppression, indulgence in frivolities,
pleasure in the piquant, a delight in indelicate
jokes, which forcibly intrude into life and
art ; on the other hand, as the natural reaction
to this, an over-luxuriance of scientific and
pseudo-scientific sexual literature. And all
because morality became a ruinously over-
valued idea. I do not wish to be misunderstood.
Morality will always remain the goal of noble
souls, but only that kind of morality which
harmonizes with man's nature. Where morality
does violence to nature it becomes natural, and
brings about not ethical freedom but ethical
burdening.

But moraHty is not the only overvalued idea
that turns the half of mankind into fools. If we
survey the chaos of modern social life we shall
easily find everywhere evidences of the endless
disputes and irritating conflicts caused by over-
valued ideas. Scientists may prove that the
theory of races is no longer tenable, that the
asserted purity of races is a fable, etc. Not-
withstanding all that, the German Workurka
and the Checko rustic are always at each other's
throats. Why cite other examples ? In racial,
religious, national, and other discords it is always
an overvalued idea that makes a harmonious
evolution impossible. Verily, the whole world
is an insane asylum because the essential factor
in delusions, an overvalued idea, pervades the air
like infectious psychic germs.

Will the world ever be better ? From a

i6o OVERVALUED IDEAS

survey of the past we are justified only in being
coldly sceptical and discouragingly dubious. A
conflict of ideas will continue as long as there are
dissensions between human beings. Ideas to
wage a war for exsistence. A few survive longer
than others, are highly esteemed till their course
is run and are discovered to have been over-
valued. But as long as they have the mastery
they change credulous men into foolish children.
From this endless round there is no escape.
And folly and wisdom lead the never-ending
dance until the dark, wide open gates of the
future swallow them.

AFFECTIONATE PARENTS

The last few years the child has become the
centre of interest. Funny as it may sound, it
may almost be asserted that we had just re-
discovered the child. Congresses are held,
artists devote their talents to portraying the
life of the child, expositions acquaint us with the
many aspects of the advances that have been
made in the new knowledge. Is it any wonder
then that we have suddenly been made acquainted
with the abuses of children ? That we have
shudderingly learned that there are children who
are tortured by their own mothers ? There were
loud cries of horror. The fountain of humanity
became a broad stream which must drive the
mills of a new social organization in the interests
of the defenceless child. Who would withhold
his approval of this movement ? Who would
oppose it ? For truly there is no sadder spectacle
than a child tortured to death by its own parents.
The whole instinct for race preservation cries
out against it. . .

But this theme may also be regarded from
another angle, and I purpose showing from the
point of view of the physician and the pedagog
that the reverse of abuse, viz., excessive affec-
tion, has a dark side, that it, too, is capable of

(i6i)

i62 AFFECTIONATE PARENTS

ruining a child's life and condemning an inno-
cent being to lifelong suffering.

At a private gathering of physicians not long
ago the subject of the last congress for the
protection of children was discussed from its
more serious as well as lighter aspects. A
Viennese neurologist ventured the following
remark ; " I regard it as a great misfortune if a
woman's affection for her husband is expended
upon her child. A misfortune for humanity,
for, in this way, the number of nervous persons
will be incalculably increased."

One is strongly inclined at first energetically
to attack this opinion. What ! A tender,
affectionate bringing up will make a child
neurotic ? Who can prove that a happy child-
hood results in an unhappy life ? Shall parents
be afraid to show their children love ? To hug
them, kiss them, pet them ? Is not nervousness
rather the sequel to draconic sternness, tyran-
nical compulsion ?

Nonsense ! Nonsense ! I shall attempt to
answer these obtrusive questions seriatim.

But, first, one remarkable fact has to be pos-
tulated. Parents are really becoming more and
more affectionate from year to year. Such
fanatically affectionate parents as are quite
common now were formerly the exception. To-
day the parents' thoughts all centre around the
child : How to feed it, bring it up, dress it
hygienically, harden it, how to instruct it in
sexual matters. ... A flood of books and

AFFECTIONATE PARENTS 163

magazines scarcely suffices to meet the tremend-
ous concern about these matters. Can this
emanate solely from the fact that the pressing
movement for emancipation of woman has dis-
placed the woman's interest from the man to the
child ? I think that herein the neurologist is in
error. That cannot possibly be the sole cause.

The cause for the hypertrophied love of the
child is adduced from the consideration of those
cases which even in former times offered instances
of an exaggerated parental affection amounting
to doting love. The over-indulged child was
almost invariably an only child whom popular
speech designates a " trembling joy."

It is to be regretted that most modern families
are made up of such " trembling joys." " Neo-
Malthusianism " has infected the whole world.
In consequence of the employment of innumer-
able and more or less generally employed anti-
conceptives the birth rate is steadily declining.
" Two-children families " is the rule, and families
with many children — especially among the well-
to-do — the exception. Even the vaunted
fecundity of the Germans which is always being
held up as a model to the French will soon be a
thing of the past. In former decades 1,000
married women in BerHn gave birth to 220
children and from 1873 to 1877 the number
even rose to 231. Since then the birth rate is
decHning from year to year, so that in 1907
1,000 women only had ill children. In other
large cities matters are even worse than in Berlin

i64 AFFECTIONATE PARENTS

in this regard. But it would be decidedly
wrong to infer that there is a diminution in the
number of marriages. In Prussia the number
of marriages from 1901 to 1904 was at the rate
of 8 per 1,000, whereas in 1850 it was somewhat
less, to wit : 7*8 per 1,000. Sociologists have
detected in this state of affairs a great danger
for the mental prospects of the race inasmuch as
matters in this regard are much better in the
country and, consequently, they say, the progeny
of the farmer class will in a not remote period
tremendously exceed the intelligent descendants
of urban people in number. The country will
get the best of the city and not vice versa. But
we must not wander away from our subject.
Let us take this fact for granted : The " two-
children system " is the cause for the excessive
parental affection we have described. But
wherein is this dangerous ?

I shall not attempt here a detailed statement
of the well-known dangers. We all know that
coddled children very often become helpless,
dependent persons, that they cannot find their
place in life, and do not seem to be armed against
adversity. It seems superfluous to dwell at
greater length on this. Of greater significance is
the phenomenon that the exaggerated affection
lavished on the child creates a correspondingly
large need for affection in it. A need for affec-
tion that is tempestuous in its demand for
gratification. As long as these children are young
so long is this demand fully satisfied. The

AFFECTIONATE PARENTS 165

parents, and especially mothers, are so over-
joyed at their children's manifestations of love
that out of their overflowing hearts they re-
ward them by overwhelming them with caresses.
Thus the measure of affectionate demonstrations
rises instead of gradually sinking. And now
the time comes for the child to go to school.
And for the first time in its life it stands in the
presence of the will of a stranger who demands
neither petting nor love, only work done without
grumbling. How easily this situation gives rise
to conflict ! The child thinks it is not loved by
the teacher, it is terrified by a harsh word and
begins to cry. School becomes odious to it ;
it learns unwillingly. It asks for another
school and for other teachers. If its wish is
gratified the same thing is soon repeated.

Matters get much worse when these children
grow up. They have an unquenchable craving
for caresses. From them are developed the
women who kill their husband's love by their
own immoderate love. Every day they want to
be told that their husbands still love them.
Daily — nay, hourly — they wish to be the re-
cipients of sweets, loving words, private pet
names and kisses without number. The men,
on the other hand, who had been so coddled in
their childhood, are only in the rarest instances
satisfied with their wives ; sooner or later they
seek to compensate outside of the home for the
insufficient affection shown by the wife ; or they
transfer this requirement upon the children who

i66 AFFECTIONATE PARENTS

thus become seriously (though not congenitally)
burdened. But even this is not the worst.

The greatest dangers of excessive affection
are known to only very few persons. They
consist in a premature excitation of the erotic
emotions. We are so prone to forget unpleasant
experiences. Hence comes it that most adults
have no recollection of their own youthful
erotic experiences. Parents especially are very
forgetful in this regard — so much so that their
forgetfulness amounts almost to a pathological
condition bordering on hysterical amnesia.
Thence comes it that most mothers will take an
oath on their daughters' innocence and fathers
on their sons' purity. They talk themselves
into the belief that their children are exceptions,
that they are incredibly simple, still believe in the
stork myth and other similar stupidities.

That the sexual enlightenment of the child is an
important problem and of far-reaching signifi-
cance for its whole life is proved in numberless
books and essays dealing with the subject. We
are told that open scientific instruction should
take the place of secret knowledge obtained from
turbid channels. Very fine ! But the world
must not believe that the child's first erotic
knowledge is awakened as a result of such
instruction. That is a widespread superstition.
The sexual life of the child does not begin with
puberty, the old books to the contrary notwith-
standing, but with the day of its birth.

On the occasion of a sad criminal trial in

AFFECTIONATE PARENTS 167

which children were charged with being prosti-
tutes, public opinion was horrified at the wicked-
ness of these poor creatures. And yet most of
them were victims of their environment. Does
any one really believe that such occurrences are
rare exceptions ? That is a myth. We talk
ourselves into the belief that the little child that
is still unable to speak is not receptive to erotic
impressions. How do we know this ? The
brain of a child is like a photographic plate that
greedily catches impressions, independently of
whether they are intelligible or not, impressions
whose influence may be operative throughout
its life. As we know, there is a large group of
investigators which traces all perverse mani-
festations of the sexual impulses back to a
fixation of the earliest erotic experience. Erotic
stimulation can subsequently be brought about
only by way of an association with this early
impression. This explanation certainly does
seem to fit the curious phenomenon known as
fetichism. In this way children's experiences
influence their whole life. In sexual matters
human beings behave with incredible naivete.
They close their eyes and will not see. Frank
Wedekind is perfectly right in deriding a world
that has secrets even from itself. So infantile
sexuality is a secret which every intelligent
person knows.

If parents only kept this in their mind's eye !
Then it would not happen that children ten
years of age and older would be permitted to

1 68 AFFECTIONATE PARENTS

sleep in their parents' bedrooms that the
anxious father and mother might watch over the
gentlest breath of their precious darHngs. These
parents do not want to consider the possibility
that the children may in this way receive im-
pressions which may prove very injurious to
them. Many a case of obstinate insomnia in
childhood or of nocturnal attacks of apprehension
is explained in this way. I have repeatedly
cured sleepless children by the simple remedy
of ordering them to sleep in separate bedrooms.

Let us assume then that all children are
susceptible to erotic stimuli and that such
stimulation may harm them. For the later a
person's conscious sexual life begins the greater
the prospects of his becoming a healthy, mentally
well-balanced individual. Among the factors
capable of permanently arousing erotic
emotions we must include excessive affection.
Between the affections of one who loves and of a
mother there are really no differences. Both kiss,
caress, fondle, hug, embrace, pet, etc. That the
excitement is transmitted to the same central
organs is obvious.

In this way the child receives its first erotic
sensations from its nurse. Interpret it as we may
the nurse, the attendant, the mother, the father
are the child's first love, the first erotic love, as
our psychoanalysis has convincingly demon-
strated. But this must not be interpreted to
mean that I wish to condemn the affectionate
management of children. On the contrary !

AFFECTIONATE PARENTS 169

A certain quantity of affection is, as a matter of
fact, essential to the normal development of the
individual. But the affection lavished on
them must not be excessive. For if it is the
child will be prematurely brought into a condition
of erotic overstimulation. It grows older and
begins to feel the power of education. To re-
strain and curb the force of the natural impulses
powerful inhibitions are erected. As a reaction
to the premature sexual stimulation there begins
a remarkable process which may be designated as
" sexual repression." This repression may suc-
ceed so well that even the child forgets its early
experiences or the repression does not succeed
and the individual's erotic requirements grow
from year to year. In the latter case there
develops in the child a serious psychic conflict
between sexual longing and sexual renunciation
and thus the soil in which a neurosis may grow
is prepared. Perhaps the conflict is the neurosis.
We shall mention only in passing that such
exaggerated affection begets in many children
the habit of securing for themselves a certain
amount of pleasurable sensations by way of
certain auto-erotic actions. It is not possible,
nor necessary, to enter into a detailed discussion
of these matters here. For most people know
that our experiences in childhood influence
our whole life. But it is a tragic commentary
on human strivings that excessive parental love
may bring sickness upon the child, that a happy
present is replaced by an unhappy future, that

170 AFFECTIONATE PARENTS

the roses a mother strews in her child's path only
later show their thorns.

We cannot say it too often : We fuss too much
with our children. There is too much theory in
this matter of bringing up children. We pay too
much attention to our children. Let us leave
them their peaceful childhood, their merry games,
the wondrous product of their untiring phantasy.
Let us clearly realize that with our excessive
affection we give ourselves a great deal of
pleasure but that at the same time we are doing
the children a great injury. Let no one dis-
courage mothers from being affectionate to their
children, from expending loving attentions on
them, from making their youth as pleasant as
possible. But the parents' affection should not
expend itself mechanically. It should be a uni-
formly warm fire that only warms, kindles no
fire, and bursts into a bright flame only on life's
great holidays.

WHY THEY QUARREL

When a happy married couple laughingly
assures me that the heaven of their marriage was
always cloudless and that there were no thunder-
storms and no lightning flashes I accept it as
self-evident, but to myself I think : they are
lying. When two friends assure me that they
have never quarrelled I think the same thing.
I know that they have not been telling the truth.
That is, they are liars without the consciousness
of lying. They are firmly convinced that they
were telling only what was true, because they
have " repressed " the unpleasant, the painful,
the objectionable. And thus it comes to pass
that lovers forget all the " scenes " that had
occurred between them, and that friends become
oblivious of the little unpleasantnesses that had
caused them so much suffering, and that they can
assert, with the utmost conviction, that they had
never quarrelled. We do not quaff the lethe-
potion of oblivion at our life's end. No, we
sip it daily, and it is this that enables us to main-
tain that optimism which ever looks hopefully
into the future and anticipates thornless roses.

There are people who must always be quarrel-
ling, whose exuberant energy must be discharged
in this way, to whom life does not seem worth

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172 WHY THEY QUARREL

while if it runs along smoothly. These arc the
everlastingly unsatisfied who have not found the
ideals of their youth, who have not attained
their dreams. They project their discontent,
their internal distraction, upon all their daily
experiences. That is why they so often appear
to be overcharged with emotion ; that is why the
intensity of their excitement is imcomprehen-
sible to us. For it is a fact that they fly into
rages about trivial matters. But it is this very
intensity of emotion that shows that there is
more behind these little rows than they will
ordinarily admit, that the quarrel derives its
fuel from a deeper source than appears on the
surface.

It has struck many observers that the ex-
ternal provocation to quarrelling is often very
trivial. Of course we frequently hear a man or
his wife declare that they would gladly avoid
a quarrel if it were possible to do so. Either one
says something that seems to be quite innocent,
and yet it will be the occasion for a heated
altercation, a great domestic scene with all its
unpleasant consequences.

This is due to the fact that most persons do
not distinguish between cause and provocation.
The provocation to a quarrel is easily found
if hidden unconscious forces seek for it, if a
deeper cause, acting as a driving power, sets the
wheels of passion in motion.

A somewhat careful investigation of every
quarrel easily brings the conviction that it is

WHY THEY QUARREL 173

invariably the secret, unconscious emotions that
bring about the conflict of opinions. Where
this deep resonance of the unconscious is lacking
we playfully pass over differences. Unfortun-
ately there are probably no two human beings
whose souls vibrate so harmoniously that there
never occurs a discord. This phenomenon is
altogether too deeply rooted in human nature
for an exception ever to occur. And paradoxical
as it may sound, it is lovers who love each other
most who cause each other the greatest pain.
The great intensity which their emotions attain
is due only to the fact they have repressed a
series of experiences and feelings. They are
blind to the faults of the beloved because they do
not wish to see these faults. But the suppressed
forces have not yet lost their power over the
soul. These bring about the quarrel, and are
capable, even if only for a few seconds, to trans-
form love into hatred.

But a few practical examples will do more
to make this subject clear than all our theoretical
explanations. Mr. N. S., a pious, upright man,
asserts that his present ailment dates from a
quarrel that had been frightfully upsetting him
for months. He had inherited from his father
a large library rich in manuscripts, and had also
succeeded him in his position. One day his
brother came to him and stormily demanded the
return of the books. But inasmuch as he was
the older he felt himself entitled to be the sole
heir. A violent quarrel ensued, during which

174 WHY THEY QUARREL

he exclaimed : " I'll die before I give up any of
these books ! " After the quarrel he became
very neurotic. He tortures himself with self-
reproaches ; he is convinced that with that
exclamation he had been guilty of an act of
impiety ; he is very unhappy and finds no rest,
no peace, either at home or in his office.

Many persons may be satisfied with the super-
ficial explanation offered by the patient himself
that he is an ardent bibhophile and collector of
ancient manuscripts. But the physician who
treats sick souls must not be so easily satisfied.

We know that every collector is an unconscious
Don Juan who has transferred his passion from
an erotic upon a non-erotic sphere. But we
also know that the passion with which the
collected objects are loved emanates from the
erotic domain. And what did our psycho-
analysis of the above case bring out ? Re-
markably enough a rivalry between the two
brothers which went back all the way to their
youth. The older one had the privileges of the
first-born and was a good-for-nothing. The
younger one was a pattern of what a child
ought to be. From their childhood they had
been rivals for the affection of their parents,
and more especially of the mother. We encoun-
ter here the so-called '^ Oedipus motive," a son's
love for his mother — a motive whose instinctive
force and urge are still too imperfectly appre-
ciated. The two had been rivals, the older one
being jealous of the parents' preference for the

WHY THEY QUARREL 175

younger one, and the younger jealous of the older
one's privileges. In this we have the first of the
deeper motives for the quarrel. Further in-
vestigation brought a second and a third motive
to light. The older had, very naturally, married
first, and repeatedly boasted in the presence of
his younger and unmarried brother of his wife's
charms and virtues. In fact, he had even led
him into his wife's bedroom that he might see
for himself what a treasure he possessed. (You
see the motives of such stories as *' Gyges and his
Ring " and " King Candaules " occurring even
nowadays.) At that moment a great passion
for his sister-in-law flared up in the younger
brother's breast. Here we have then a second
cause for dissension. But other factors are also
involved. Our pious young man married a
beautiful woman and would have been happy if
he had not been the victim of a jealous passion.
Jealousy always has its origin in the knowledge
of one's inferiority. He thought he noticed that
his older brother was too devoted to his wife.
And during an excursion into the country they
had been in the woods a little too long, as he
thought, and it occurred to him — and here we
have the fourth motive — to tempt his sister-in-
law. He is a Don Juan who runs after every
petticoat and wants to drain life in large draughts.
N. S. was a pious virtuous man who knew how to
turn his sinful cravings to good account for the
success of his business and to bad account as far
as his health was concerned. The brother whom

176 WHY THEY QUARREL

he despised openly he envied in secret. But we
could mention still other motives for their
quarrel if Mrs. Grundy considerations did not
bar the way . . .

Unconscious sexual motives lurk behind many
quarrels, one might almost say behind most
quarrels. We have already hinted that dis-
sensions between brothers or sisters are due to
rivalry. But even in the quarrels between
parents and children we may frequently enough
demonstrate the identical undertone for the dis-
'harmony. The infant son sees in his father a
rival for the mother's favour. The reverse also
occurs, though not so frequently. I was once the
witness to a violent quarrel between a father and
his son. The father had, as it seemed to me,
not the slightest cause for grievance against the
son, and yet a little trifle led to a violent alterca-
tion that ended in a tragic scene. At the height
of the row the father screamed to his wife :
" You are to blame for it all ! You robbed me
of my son's love ! "

Naturally one would think that this lava
stream belched forth in a great burst of passion
from a volcano would contain the truth in its
torrid current. And so it does, but in a disguised
form. The true reproach should have been
directed at the son, and should have been :
" You have robbed me of my wife's love ! "

We see in this a " transference " of a painful
emotion from one person upon another. Such
transferences or ** displacements " are ex-

WHY THEY QUARREL 177

tremely common in everyday life, and it is only
with their aid that we can account for the many
domestic conflicts. A man will rarely admit that
he erred in the choice of a wife. The feeling of
hatred that his wife engenders in him he transfers
upon others. Upon whom ? The answer is
obvious. Upon her next of kin. Most frequently
upon her mother, the most immediate cause
of her existence. This is the secret meaning
of the many mother-in-law jokes, a never-failing
and inexhaustible and perpetual theme for wits.

So that, for example, if we hear a young
woman complain that she cannot bear her
husband's family but that she loves him beyond
bounds we may with perfect safety translate this
in the language of the unconscious thus : " I
would not care a rap about my husband's family
if I did not have to love my husband."

The rows with servants, well-known daily
occurrences, become intelligible only if we know
the law of transference. An unfaithful wife,
who had been betrayed and deserted by her
lover, suddenly began to watch her servant
girls suspiciously, and to strike them on the
slightest provocations. The woman had for
years employed '* help " without having had more
than the customary quarrels with them. After a
short sojourn with her husband the rage of the
abandoned woman, who would have loved to
give her faithless lover a good thrashing in true
southern fashion, was transferred upon her
servants. And exactly Hke this the resentment

178 WHY THEY QUARREL

of many a housewife is discharged through these
more or less innocent lightning rods, and thus is
brought about the phenomenon so common
in modern large cities which may be designated
as " servant-girl neurosis."

Obviously the deeper motives slumber in the
unconscious, and if they ever become conscious
they are looked upon as sinfulness and bad
temper. Freud has become the founder of a
wholly new psychology by virtue of his discovery
of the laws of repression and of transference —
a psychology which will be indispensable to the
criminologist of the future. What is nowadays
brought to light in our halls of justice as the
psychological bases for conflicts is generally
only superficial psychology.

This is strikingly illustrated by one of the
saddest of legal proceedings of last year. I
mean the trial for murder in the Murri-Bou-
martini case, in consequence of which an innocent
victim — so I am convinced — the Countess
Linda Boumartini is languishing in prison.
Her brother TuUio, who had murdered his
brother-in-law, was accused of an illicit relation-
ship with his sister, for otherwise the murder
would have been inexplicable. One who has
carefully read Linda's memoirs and her letters,
which are now before the public, as well as the
confessions of the imprisoned Tullio, will be sure
to laugh at the accusation, which unquestionably
owed its origin to a clerical plot. What may have
really happened is that unconscious brotherly

WHY THEY QUARREL 179

love which deep down under consciousness
in all likelihood takes it origin from the sexual
but whose flowers appear on the surface of con-
sciousness as the loftiest manifestations of
ethical feeling. It was brotherly love, the
primal motive which Wagner immortalised in his
" Walkyre," that forced the dagger into Tulho
Murri's hand. He saw his sister suffer and go to
pieces because of the brutal stupidity of his
brother-in-law. What lay hidden behind his
pure fraternal love may never have entered his
consciousness.

Oh, we unfortunates, doomed to eternal blind-
ness ! What we see of the motives of great
conflicts is usually only the surface. Even in the
case of the httle domestic quarrels, the irritating
frictions of everyday life, the vessel of knowledge
sails only over the easily excited ripples. But
what gives these waters their black aspect is the
deep bed over which they lie. Down there,
at the bottom of the sea which represents our
soul, there ever abide ugly, deformed monsters —
our instincts and desires — emanating from the
beginnings of man's history. When they bestir
their coarse bodies the sea too trembles and is
slightly set in motion. And we stupid human
beings think it is the surface wind that has begot
the waves.

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

It was getting late. The last guests had left
the caf6. The waiters, tired and sleepy, were
prowling around our table with a peculiar ex-
pression in their countenances which clearly
challenged us to call for our checks . . .

We took no notice of them. Or rather, we
refused to take notice. The sudden death of
one of our dearest friends had aroused something
incomprehensible in us which made us very
restless. We were speaking about premoni-
tions, and that peculiar intangible awe which one
feels in the presence of the incomprehensible, the
supernatural, which at certain times overcomes
even the most confirmed sceptic, sat at our
table.

The journalist — -who could not deny a slight
tendency to mysticism — was of the opinion that
he would certainly not die a natural death. That
was all we could get him to say on the subject at
this time. Finally however he confessed, with
pretended indifference, that he has the certain
premonition that he will one day be trampled
to death by frightened horses.

" Nonsense ! " — " Nursery tales ! " — " Super-
stition ! " several voices exclaimed simultaneously

But the physician shook his head gravely.

(i8©)

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE i8i

" Strange ! Very strange ! Do you put any
stock in this looking into the future ? "

The journalist blushed so slightly that it
could hardly be noticed, the way men blush when
they fear that they had betrayed a weakness.
Cautiously he replied : " And why not ? Can
you prove the contrary ? Have we not until
only a few years ago pooh-poohed the idea of
telepathy and called it superstition ? But now-
a-days that the X-rays, wireless telegraphy and
other marvels have revolutionised our ideas
about matter and energy and even space, we no
longer laugh pityingly at the poor dreamers who,
like Swedenburg, the northern magician, see
things that are beyond the field of vision of
their bodily eyes. Why then should I doubt the
possibility of somebody some day finding an
explanation for the ability to ' look into the
future ' ? "

" Bosh ! " exclaimed the lawyer. " That's aU
fantastic piffle ! I can cite you an example
from my own experience which is as interesting
as it is instructive. I was very sick and confined
to bed. Suddenly I awoke, my heart palpitating,
and heard a loud voice screaming these words
right into my ears : ' You will live fourteen days
more ! Take advantage of this period ! ' Just
fourteen days later I was sailing on the ocean.
A frightful sirocco wind was tossing our little
steamer from right to left and from left to right
so violently that we could not retain our upright
positions. And suddenly my prophecy — which I

i82 LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

had almost completely forgotten — came back to
me. But I remained very cool, like a scientist
who is on the eve of making a great discovery
and risking his life to do so. As you see I did
not die, and the ship came safely into port.
But had I accidentally perished, and if my
prophetic dream — the outward projection of my
unconscious fear — my unpleasant hallucination
had been known to the people about me — the
matter would have been construed as a new con-
firmation of the truth of premonitions. We have
so many premonitions that are never fulfilled that
the few that happen accidentally to come true do
not really matter. Lots of things in life are that
way. We speak of our ' hard luck ' because we
forget the times when we have been lucky.
Luck rushes by so swiftly ! Bad luck creeps, oh,
so slowly ! And, coming down to facts, I do not
know of a single instance of an undoubted ful-
fillment of a prophecy. For I must confess that
all these American and Berlin prophets who have
recently given such striking proofs of their
* second sight ' do not impress me. They have
not uttered a single prophecy precisely and
accurately, and oracular speeches delivered in
general terms are as elastic as a rubber band, and
can be applied to almost anything. A great
conflagration, a destructive earthquake, or a
cruel war will rarely disappoint a prophet.
Somewhere or other in this wide world there is a
conflagration some time during the year, the earth
rocks somewhere, and somewhere machine guns

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE 183

are being fired. I therefore do not believe that
our friend will be trampled to death by frightened
horses. At the most what will happen will be
that his pegasus, growing tired of being abused
by him, will suddenly throw him down."

For a little while there was silence. We had
the feeling that the counsellor's malicious witti-
ism was out of place at this time. The doctor
broke the silence. " What will you say, my dear
friends, if I tell you that a prominent scientist
and psychologist has reported a case which seems
to prove the possibility of looking into the future.
I say * seems ' only because there is an explana-
tion which re-transforms the supernatural into
the natural. The physician in question, the well-
known Dr. Flournoy, had frequently been con-
sulted by a young man w^ho was suffering from
peculiar attacks of apprehension. Day and
night he was haunted by the idea that he would
fall from a high mountain into a deep precipice,
and so be killed. Logic and persuasion were of
no avail in dealing with this obsession. It was
easy enough for Flournoy to point out that all
the young man had to do was to keep away from
mountains, and there would be no possibility of
his meeting such a frightful end. The patient grew
very melancholic, and could not be persuaded to
enjoy life as formerly. Imagine this experienced
psychologist's amazement on reading in his news-
paper one day that his patient had been instantly
killed by accidentally falling from a steep but
easily passable ridge while he was taking a walk

1 84 LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

in a sanitarium in the Alps."

The journalist exclaimed triumphantly :
" Doctor, you've disproved your own theory.
If what you've just told us doesn't prove the
power to look into the future, then nothing does."

" Pish ! Pish ! " replied the physician.
" Haven't I said that the explanation is to
follow ? "

We were all very curious to hear how such a
strange occurrence could be explained without
the aid of the supernatural. The physician lit
another cigar and continued : " What, coming
down to facts, is fear ? You all know what it is,
for I have told you often enough : fear — anxiety
— apprehension — is a repressed wish. Every
time that two wishes are in conflict as to which
one is to have mastery over the individual the
wish that has to yield is perceived in conscious-
ness as apprehension. A young girl is appre-
hensive when she finds herself for the first time
alone in a room with her sweetheart. For the
time being she is afraid of what later on she may
wish for. Dr. Flournoy's melancholic young
man was clearly tired of life. The wish may have
come upon him once to make an end of his life
by throwing himself from a great height — from
such a height as would make failure of the suici-
dal attempt impossible. This wish may have
come to him at night in a dream, or perhaps just
before he fell asleep, while he was in a state between
sleep and waking. Who knows ? But it must
have prevailed before the will to live had re-

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE 185

pressed it and converted it into apprehension.
And his prophetic premonitions were nothing but
the misunderstood voice from within. And his
mysterious death was nothing but — suicide.
I have forgotten to tell you that, according to
the newspaper reporters, he had sat down on the
edge of a precipice and fallen asleep. He had
fallen down while asleep. As if the voices in his
dream had whispered to him : * Come ! do what
you so earnestly yearn to do ! Die ! Now you
have a fine opportunity ! ' The moment had
come when the fear had become the stronger
wish."

The journalist was pale. The doctor's ex-
planation seemed to have stirred up something
in the deepest layers of his soul. His voice
box was seen to make that automatic movement
which we all make when we are embarrassed, as
if we wished to speak but could not find the
right word. Finally, after he had coughed a
little several times, as if to clear his vocal cords,
he remarked in a somewhat heavy voice : " That
would throw a peculiar light upon many acci-
dental falls in the mountains. You recall, no
doubt, that a short time ago a well-known tourist
had fallen from a relatively safe cliff. He carried
a lot of insurance, and the insurance companies
were very anxious to prove it a case of suicide.
Is it possible that in this case, too, an " unconscious
power co-operated ? "

" Certainly ! " exclaimed the physician.
" Certainly ! At any rat«, it is my conviction

1 86 LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

that many persons seek nothing but death in the
mountains. I have certainly met many tourists
who had nothing more to hope for from life.
One who does not fear death no longer loves life,
or, at any rate, no longer loves it to such an
extent as not to be willing to gamble with it.
Have any of you an idea how many of our actions
have their origin in * unconscious ' motives ?
All our life our shadow, our other self, walks by
our side and has its say in everything we do.
As long as it is only a shadow it is not dangerous.
But, woe, if the shadow materialises, as the
spiritualists say. The tourist makes a false
step and falls into an abyss. Who or what
guided his foot ? Was it chance — or the un-
acted wish that slumbered so long beyond the
threshold of consciousness ? Or shall we say
that while one was climbing up a steep mountain
path his strength failed him, and he was pre-
cipitated into the depths below ? Who can
decide in such a case as to just what happened ?
For a little moment the climber must have had
the thought ' if you are not careful now you will
fall and be killed.' The next moment there may
have issued from the repressed * complexes ' the
command : ' Do it ! Then you are free and rid
of all your troubles ! ' So our young man could
have continued to live on the even ground, as
Flournoy had advised him to do. But he pre-
ferred to go to the mountains. Perhaps it
would be better to say that something drew him
to the mountains. It was the same power that

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE 187

precipitated him into the abyss : his life-weari-
ness. The trip he took to the country for the
sake of his health was from the very beginning
a flight into the realm of death. He pursued
his shadow just as "

He did not finish his sentence. His cigar had
gone out. He Ht it again, and with wide open
eyes gazed into the distance as if he had more to
say but could not find the right word.

There was silence for a time, and finally the
counsellor ventured to say : " Very interesting
case ! I wonder if its psychology could not be
generalised ? Isn't it possible that a large
number of the other daily fatal accidents could
not be instances of ' unconscious suicide ' ?
There is, for example, the case of the man who is
run over by a cable-car because he did not hear
the bell, the unlucky swimmer who is overcome
by cramps, the victim of the fellow who did not
know the revolver was loaded. Haven't all
these little and big accidents their shadowy
motivation ? "

" Of course they have," replied the physician.
" Of course ! We really know so little of the
things we do and even less why we do them.
Our emotions, our feelings, are really only the
resultants of numerous components ; they are
only tensions giving shadowy testimony of
ripening forces. We think we are directing
these forces, but we are being driven by them ;
we think we make our decisions, but we only
accept the decisions of ' the other fellow ' in us.

1 88 LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

Professor Freud has assured himself a place
amongst the immortals with his psychological
theory concerning so-called ' symptomatic
acts.' He has substituted a ' secret inner will '
for ' blind chance.' "

" And what about looking into the future ? "
inquired the journalist.

" Why, that's only looking backward. We
can easily predict for ourselves anything we
long for, and can easily have presentiments
about what we do not wish to avert. The facts
which permit us to glimpse the future are
gleaned from our yesterdays. Our childhood
wishes determine our subsequent history. All
of us could readily read our future could we call
into new life our childhood emotions. What we
dreamed of in childhood we wish to experience
as adults. And if we cannot experience it we
are drawn back into the realm of eternal dreams.
This is as true of humanity as a whole as of man
individually. Only when we study our past
can we see the future of our present, then can we
predict that our modern, ultra-modern time with
its innumerable stupidities, with its conflicts and
ideals, with its strivings and discoveries, will be
as far outstripped as we imagine ourselves to
have outstripped our ancestors. Science and
art, politics and public life — all a perpetual
circle tending towards an unknown future. . ."

" So then, to return to my glimpse of the
future," the journalist interrupted, " that I shall
be crushed by runaway horses ? "

. LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE 189

The physician smiled superiorly. " Just try
to think back and see whether your presenti-
ment has not its roots in the past ! "

" Something now occurs to me," exclaimed the
mystic ; " my mother used to prophesy that I
would not die a natural death. I was a very wild
youth, and managed to spend a lot of time with
the horses in our stable. In great anger my
dear little mother would then launch all sorts of
gloomy predictions concerning my destiny."

His mysterious look into the future was now
explained. The doctor ventured to remark that
this " case " also illustrated how intimately
superstition and a consciousness of guilt are
linked together. The imaginary glimpse into
the future was in his friend's case also only a
glimmer out of the past. He referred to the
remarkable fact that our earliest recollections
represent a reflection of our future. . . .

" There are facts " — he said slowly, hesita-
tingly, as if the words had to be forced out of his
interior — " which one can hardly explain. I
once loved a woman with such an intense love as I
have not felt for any woman since. We spent a
wonderful day together. Then we bade each
other good-night. I remained standing, looking
after her. She was walking through the high
reeds in a meadow. Her graceful figure was
getting smaller and smaller. With a slight turn
in the road she disappeared from my view but
soon reappeared. Then for a while I saw her
shadowy outline until a clump of trees again

190 LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

hid her trom my view. Then I saw her again,
but very small. I saw something white — her
handkerchief. At this moment a shiver went
through me, and I thought : that's how you will
lose her ; gradually you will cease to see her ;
twice she will re-appear, and then she will be gone
for ever ! — Nonsense, said I to myself, and spun
bold plans for the future. . . . But the
future proved that my presentiment had been
true. Everything happened as I had felt it
that evening. A glimpse into the future !
And yet ! Sometimes I think to myself that I
had only realised the impossibility of a union
between us. What I felt as a presentiment may
have been only clearer inner comprehension."

The waiter yawned loud. This time we took
the hint and paid. We went home, and some-
thing oppressive, unspoken, weighed us all down.
As if we were not quite satisfied with the solution
of the mystery — as if the shuddering sweetness
of a superstitious belief in supernatural powers,
a belief in a something above and beyond us
would be more to our liking. Silently we took
our way through the quiet streets. We felt, for
all the world, like children who had been told
by their mother that the beautiful story was only
a story — that the prince and the princess had
never really lived.

We had been robbed of one of life's fairy tales.
Fie ! Fie on this naked, sober, empty reaHty !
How much nicer it would be if we could look into
the future !

LOOKING BACKWARD

Around Christmas of every year a pale woman
clad in black consults me and bewails her fate.
It is a pitiful tale that she narrates tearfully.
A ruined life, a ruined marriage ! One of those
fearful disappointments experienced by women
who, utterly unacquainted with the world, and
not brought up to be independent, entrust all
their dammed-up longing for happiness and love
to the first man who happens to cross their path.
The first time she came I was touched with pity
and could have wept with her. The best advice
I could give her was wholly to separate from her
husband, forget the past, and to build up a new
life. The second time she came I was somewhat
unpleasantly surprised, because the unfortunate
woman had not yet screwed her courage to the
sticking-point and was wasting her life in gloomy
broodings about the incomprehensibleness of her
destiny. But this time she promised to employ
all the means and resources at her disposal to
get out of her fruitless conflict and useless
complainings. . . . Since her first visit ten years
have passed, but she still stands on the ruins of
her hopes and laments her wasted life. Her
figure, which was once slender and sinewy, looks
as if it were broken in many parts ; her face

191

192 LOOKING BACKWARD

shows the first traces of age. Now she hat
additional cause for grieving. She looks into
the mirror and is unhappy that she has changed
so. " What has become of me and the beauty
that so many admired ? " Before her mind's
eye she sees again the men who once wooed her
and whom she had rejected. Every one of them
would probably have made her happier than the
one she had chosen !

She augments her complainings and empha-
sizes her despair. All her friends and all her
relatives, her physicians and her confidants,
know her sad lot and have no new words of
consolation for her, only conventional phrases
and stereotyped gestures. Because of her com-
plainings she is becoming a nuisance to every-
body. Her pain has reached that dangerous
point where the tragic becomes the comic. In
vain she tries to move her hearers by heightening
the dramatic description of the unalterableness
of her situation. She becomes aware that human
beings can become partisans only in the presence
of fresh conflicts and very quickly become
accustomed to others' unhappiness. And this,
of course, gives her additional reason for think-
ing herself lonesome, misunderstood, and for-
saken, and thus a new melody is added to her
stale song. If she had before this compared
herself with her happier sisters, her consciousness
of still possessing youth and beauty afforded
her a certain comfort. Hope gently whispered
to her : " You can still change it ! you are still

LOOKING BACKWARD 193

young and desirable ! you will yet find a man to
appreciate you and to give you the happiness
which the other destroyed ! "

Gradually there crept into her embittered
soul envy of the youth and beauty of others and
augmented the poison of her depression. There
was no longer any escape from this labyrinth of
woes ! In whatever direction she looked, she saw
only grey clouds ; everywhere she saw dark and
confused roads losing themselves in the darkness
of a ruined life. One would suppose that by
this time she would have resolutely determined
to end her sufferings and remove herself from a
world which had nothing more to offer her.

One who supposes any such thing is not
acquainted with this type of person. He has
not yet discovered the secret of " sweet sorrow,"
the delights of self-pity. This woman, too,
found her pleasure in the tragic role which life
had temporarily assigned her and to which she
was clinging spasmodically with all her power.
She virtually drank herself drunk with the thought
that she was the unhappiest woman in the
world. She directed over her own wounds all
the streams of love that flowed from her warm
heart. She tore these wounds open again and
again so as to be unhappy and pity herself.
If it did not sound so paradoxical, I would say
that this woman would be unhappy if one de-
prived her of her unhappiness. I wonder
whether an unconscious religious motive did not
play a role in this self-assumed suffering. Did

194 LOOKING BACKWARD

she hope for compensation in the life to come for
all the happiness that she had missed in this
world ? Was her everlasting looking backwards
only a voluntarily maintained attitude behind
which was concealed the anticipation of never-
ending looking into a radiant eternity ?

All my attempts to restore her to an active
life failed. The surest of all therapeutic re-
medies, work, failed because she never took the
matter seriously. She stubbornly maintained
herself in the position of looking backward, and
from this position no power on earth could move
her . . .

One who looks upon the Bible as a poetic
account of eternal conflicts and has learned to
recognise the symbolic significance of legendary
lore will have no difficulty in recognizing in the
story of Sodom and Gomorrah the significance
of looking backwards. The woman who was
converted into a pillar of salt because she looked
back into the burning city — what a wonderful
symbolisation of losing oneself in the past !
Everyone has his secret Sodom, his Gomorrah,
his disappointments, his defeats, his fearful
judgments ! Woe to him who looks back into
the dangerous moments of his life ! And does
not one of von Schwab's legends warn us against
the dangers of past terrors ? Does it not tell us
that we are flying madly over abysses, that the
perils of the road are concealed and that it is
dangerous to retain in the mind's eye the perils
that are past ?

LOOKING BACKWARD 195

There will be no difficulty now in comprehending
my formula that to be well is to have overcome
one's past. I know of no better means of dis-
tinguishing the neurotic from the healthy.
The healthy person also suffers disappointments
— who can escape them ? — ^he too suffers many
a fall when he thinks he is rushing on to victory,
but he will raise the tattered flag of hope and
continue on his way to the assured goal. The
neurotic does not get done with his past. All
experiences have a tenfold seriousness for him.
Whereas the healthy person throws off the burden
of past disappointments, and occasionally even
transforms the recollection of them to sources
of pleasure, and is stimulated to new efforts
by the contrasts between the pleasureable
present and the sad past, the nervous person
includes in his burdensome present the difficulties
of the past. His memories become more and
more oppressive from year to year.

It is for all the world as if the neurotic's soul
were covered over with some dangerous adhesive
material. Everything sticks to it and does not
permit itself to be loosed from it, becomes
organically united to it, wraps itself up in it,
blinds his clear vision and cripples his freedom of
motion. This not getting done with the past
betrays itself also in his inability to forgive, in
his craving for revenge and in his resentments.
A neurotic is capable of reproaching one for
some trifling humiliation or for some uncon-
sidered word many years after the event. He

196 LOOKING BACKWARD

treasures up these humiliations and defeats and
does not lose sight of them for a single day. It
might almost be said that he enacts daily the
whole repertoire of the past.

How often are we amazed to find people who
continue to make the same mistakes over and
over again and whom experience seems never to
teach anything. Nietzsche says : " If one has
character he has his experience which keeps on
recurring." In reality all that life is capable
of depends upon this ability to forget the past.
Of course some experiences continue to live
as lessons and warnings and go to make up that
uncertain treasure which we call Experience.
True greatness, however, shows itself in being
able to act in spite of one's experiences, in over-
coming latent mistrust.

What would become of us if all of us permitted
our unhappy experiences to operate as in-
hibitions ! We should resemble a person who
avoided an article of diet because it had once
disagreed with him. Experience may be that
which no one can learn unless one has been born
with it : to find the appropriate mean from one's
experiences and one's inclinations.

The nervous individual becomes useless as far
as life is concerned because his experience be-
comes a source of doubt for him and intensifies
his wanting will-power. In the presence of a
new task he takes his past into consideration
and makes his unhappy experiences serve as
warnings, hesitates, vacillates, weighs, and finally

LOOKING BACKWARD 197

docs nothing. How much could any of us do
if we lacked the courage to venture ? What
could we accomplish if we never thought the
game worth the candle ? I have often been
enabled to prove that the neurotic's will is
weak because his will is divided. I must supple-
ment this with the statement that his will is
oppressed by the burden of his past.

Let us after this disgression turn back to the
unhappy woman with whom we began. I
intimated that it was within her power to alter
her destiny. Virile and kindly disposed men
offered her a helping hand. But her unhappy
experience begot a fear of a second disillusion-
ment. She preferred to be unhappy rather than
to venture a second time and again be unhappy.

But it is not only our past unhappiness that is
dangerous. Past happiness, too, must be over-
come and grow pale. Who does not know
persons who are ever speaking of the past, the
good old days that never return ? This is a
particularly striking phenomenon with reference
to childhood. Some people do not seem to be
capable of forgetting their blissful childhood.
There is an important hint here for parents and
educators who wish to assure their children a
beautiful childhood. One must be careful that
it is not made too beautiful ! Because of the
pleasureable initiation into life the later dis-
harmonies prove too painful and awaken a
longing for childhood which can be fulfilled only
in fruitless dreams !

198 LOOKING BACKWARD

Recollections must not be permitted to kill the
present. We must not be permitted to be ever
lured back into the past and forever to be making
comparisons. Every one of us carries the key-
to his past about in his bosom and opens the
secret portals in order to roam about in it during
the night in his dreams. In the morning, just
before awaking, he locks the shrine and his
daily duties resume their career. But there are
people who cannot tear themselves away from
their dreams and are ever barkening back to the
voices of the past.

In insanity this absorption in one's past may
easily be observed. The invalids become
children again, with all their failings, their
childish prattle, their childish pranks, and their
childish games. They have come upon the road
to childhood and lost the way so that they can-
not get back again into the world of the grown-
ups. They have looked backwards so long
that finally they went backwards.

This " return to childhood " may also be
observed in nervous people who have retained
their critical faculty. I recall a woman of forty
who employed a maid to dress and undress her,
also to wash her, and who did not perform certain
personal functions without the company and
assistance of the maid. And I must not forget
to mention the twenty-four-year-old youth who
was brought to me by his mother because he was
incapable of doing any work and who was not
ashamed in my presence to take a good swallow

LOOKING BACKWARD 199

of milk every five minutes from an ordinary-
baby's milk-bottle. This kind of " infantilism "
often attains grotesque proportions. To-day
the aforementioned woman laughs at the
" incomprehensible malady," and the grown-up
suckling is an industrious official who supports
his family very comfortably. Both of them
wished to defeat nature and return to child-
hood. Not infrequently a bodily change
accompanies this mental state. The hair falls
out, the features become softer, and the signs
of adult masculinity undergo regressive changes.
In all probability this condition is associated
with certain disturbances of the internal meta-
bolism. But who can say positively whether the
impulse to these disturbances did not proceed
from the stubborn look backwards, the yearning
for childhood, and the enraptured glance into
the depths of the past ?

All the wisdom of life consists in the manner
of our forgetting. What fine overtones of the
harmonies and discords of the past must ac-
company the concords of the day ! But every
day has a right to its melody. Each one lives
its own life and is a preparation for the future.
One who fills his day with the delights and the
pains of the past murders it. Only on appro-
priate occasions may we, must we, direct our
eyes backwards, survey the path we have
traversed, and again concentrate our gaze on
the milestones of memory.

All ye who are ever bewailing your lot and are

200 LOOKING BACKWARD

incapable of rising above your fate — hearken
unto me and know that ye no longer live, that ye
died ere the law of destruction robbed ye of life !
Let me tell ye what ye may find writ in burning
letters in the firmament of knowledge : it is
never too late I Only he has lost his life who
thinks he has lost it. Forgive and forget I
Drink of the lethe of work and solicitude for
others ! Ye are egoists ! For even the mirror
of your woes on which your eyes are riveted
shows you only your own agonized image. And
measure your pains by the infinity of pain that
fills the world.

ALL-SOULS.

I am not crying for the dead who have died
but who are still alive for me. I am crying for
the dead who are still alive but who are dead for
me. When I look back upon the long succession
of years that I have travelled, and think of all
my lovers who accompanied me part of the way,
and then left me to wander alone, I feel as if a
heavy fog were enveloping everything that
otherwise appears beautiful and delightful . . .

But the dead have clung to me. They live
with me, feel with me, and speak to me. When
the noise of the day dies out and when the bells
within begin to ring, when shapeless forms
emerge from the unconscious with strange
questions and uncanny gestures, when I turn
from the world of reality into that of mystery,
then my dead friends are with me and I hold
converse with them. With every question I
wish I had asked another, and I get the con-
viction that this other one would have answered
my question, or, that other one would have
understood me.

Ah ! there is really so Httle that we desire :
we wish to be understood, and do not know that
we are demanding the impossible, the unattain-
able. For we must know ourselves ere others

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202 ALL-SOULS

can comprehend us. But the urge to share
ourselves with another, the longing for a heart
attuned to ours deceives us as to our own in-
adequacy. What we do not possess we would
find in another. And we compress all our
stupid cravings into the one wish which appears
to us as the wish for friendship.

Frightful is the thought how many friends I
have lost, how many persons whom I had once
thought so valuable and unreplaceable have
died as far as I am concerned. And even more
painful is the thought that this is the experience
of all of us. Every one of us finds persons
who accompany us a short distance, their hands
in ours, their arms about us lovingly, and we
think this will continue for ever, and then we
come to a turn in the road and they have
vanished. Or they travel along a road that seems
to run very near our own. So near one another
do we travel that we can almost touch hands
even though our paths are not the same. And
gradually our paths diverge. We are still
within sight of one another. We can still
converse with one another. Then this, too,
becomes impossible. If we shout we may
make ourselves heard on the other highway,
but there is no reply. They are gone !

First, there were the friends of our childhood !
Among these there were some whom we termed
friends but who were really only a plaything,
like the rocking-horse and the wooden sword.
They were created only for the purpose of

ALL-SOULS 203

playing a role in the rich world of our fantasies.
There was something impersonal about our
friend — he did not yet cling to us. Mother
used to say to us : " To-day you have a new
friend ! " And we were ready to accept him
as such at once unless he was unsympathetic
to us or obstinate or inclined to lord it over us.
Of course no one could be forced on us, no matter
how earnestly mother demanded it. Gradually
there developed in us that dark and puzzling
concept, made up of the fusion of numerous
primary impulses, which we call " friendship."

Then one came along who was more to us
than all the others. In his presence life was
much more beautiful and richer than we had
supposed ; when he was absent we longed for
him. When he came all our pains were for-
gotten. Ah, what great loves and hatreds we
were capable of in the blessed era of our first
friendship !

It is incomprehensible to me that I have lost
the friend of my early youth. On one occasion
our teachers interfered and separated us. Why
they did so I do not know. But I was a wild,
unruly youngster ; they may have feared that
by my example I might poison the inexpe-
rienced soul of my friend. But of what avail
were prohibitions in the presence of our great
friendship ! We met secretly behind dark
hedges, where no teacher's eyes could discover
us. As evening approached we roamed out upon
the meadow beyond the city, as far as the

204 ALL-SOULS

cemetery wall upon the gentle slope of the moun-
tain, where we could lie down at our ease and
gaze up at the stars, while we discussed the
many serious questions which were beginning
to trouble the souls of the maturing youngsters.
When night came and wrapped the white
buildings and the green gardens in a dark veil,
and when the distant trumpet summoned the
soldiers to their barracks, and at the sound
there sprang from many an obscure nook
frightened couples who quickly embraced
again and said hurried farewells, we grasped
each other's hands feverishly, and it seemed as
if we could never, never be separated. Once
we were angry at each other. It had been a
serious dispute. Both of us were obstinate,
for months we sulked and did not speak to
each other. But one day my friend's heart
melted. He confessed that he had suffered the
tortures of jealousy, and that he made up only
because he feared he might lose me for ever.

He was quite right. Slowly I had become
half a man. Instinctively I had found among
the High School pupils one who had my own
inclinations, who spent sleepless nights with me
in measuring verses on our fingers, fearing we
might be too late for immortality. If it was
the sensuous that had to be disposed of formerly,
it was now the supersensuous that forced it-
self between the innocent pleasures of life.
Now we could sit in the moonlight for hours
speculating on the mysteries of existence,

ALL-SOULS 205

infinity, and immortality. Every time we dis-
covered something beautiful we were happy
for days thereafter.

He was not our only friend in those days of
youthful enthusiasms. Then we had many,
many friends. And when we sat in the
close cafes and with palpitating hearts sang the
old student-songs, and the pitcher filled with
beer was passed around, we spoke of " eternal
friendship " and " eternal loyalty." The
" eternal " pledge was sealed by the shaking of
hands, and we really felt like brothers. Every
one had his good qualities which were admired,
his weaknesses which were smiled at indulgently,
and his strength which was feared. Each one
seemed unreplaceable, and once when death
snatched one of our friends from our midst
we all cried like little children who want their
mother.

And when we scattered in the directions of
the winds, one going to the High School, the
second into the army, the third into a vocation,
our passion flared up again, and we swore to
come together again after a certain number of
years had gone by. What merry, spirited,
and lusty boys we were ! . . .

If only I had not seen them again, these
friends ! If only they could have continued
to live in my memory as a precious heritage
from a period that was rich in hopes and poor
in disillusionments. It is with a shudder that
I recall the evening, when, after many years of

2o6 ALL-SOULS

separation, we had a re-union. Were these my
living friends ? No, these had been dead many-
years. I sat among corpses, among alien
corpses who spoke a language that was not mine.
One whom fortune had made a millionaire
sat there vain and self-conscious. Absorbed
in himself and morose sat one who clung to his
grandiose fantasies in the modest station he
occupied. A third kept looking at his watch
uneasily because he had promised his wife
to be home before ten o'clock. The fourth
stroked his paunch and was absorbed in the
mysteries of the menu. A fifth gazed at his
highly-polished finger-nails and yawned. The
sixth and the seventh — but enough ! They
looked at one another strangely, and on the lips
of all was the unuttered question : " Why in
— did we come here ? "

These were friendships which had been made
when we were still in our childhood. Later on
the matter was not quite so simple, and it took
a long time before we found one with whom we
could become as one. In reality, we are still
like children. We want to find a playmate
for our thoughts and feelings. We let each other
speak and we listen, and we call that " being
understood." That is not so easy as one would
like to believe. There are people who cannot
listen and people to whom we cannot listen.
But ultimately one finds the right person, one
to whom we can entrust our secrets, one with
whom we share our joys and our woes. But for

ALL-SOULS 207

how long ? How strange ! The fate of these
friendships is sealed the moment a third person
acquires the right to participate : a woman.
Marriage is the rock on which most friendships
split. What was formerly a question for two
is now a question for three. And if the friend
too marries it becomes a question for four. But
how difficult it is to find four persons whose
hearts beat harmoniously ! What new elements
now enter into the previous requirements " to
understand each other ! " Vanity, jealousy,
envy, disfavour.

And thus we lose one friend after the other.
And one day we find ourselves in an all-souls'
mood, and place wreaths on the graves of the
dead who are dead to us. We ask ourselves
anxiously whose the fault was that we are so
lonesome. And if we are not honest we blame
the others. But if we are honest we see that
we were not free from guilt and from all the
hateful things that human beings say about one
another, and we realize that it is man's destiny
to be alone. The more pronounced our in-
dividuality becomes, the more sharply our
qualities are outlined, the more difficult is it to
lose oneself in a crowd. We are not capable
of keeping our friends. We demand instead of
giving. And that is why we lose them and weep
at their graves.

I had one friend who was true to me through
all the vicissitudes of life. Fate drove this one
friend far away, and when we got the chance

2o8 ALL-SOULS

occasionally to see each other it was only for a
few hours, which fled like seconds — so much did
we have to say to each other. It was our earnest
yearning once to get a chance to go away during
the summer and spend a vacation together,
free and unhampered, satiate ourselves with
each other, and then have enough for a whole
year. At the cost of many sacrifices we succeeded
in having our dream fulfilled. But I would not
make the attempt again. I am afraid I would
lose my friend altogether.

When we found the long days before us and
heard ourselves again and wanted to open our
hearts to each other, we became aware — with
secret horror — that we had become different in
many respects. And occasionally in those
beautiful hours we were conscious of something
like a shudder at the thought that something
fine and delicate that had been anxiously
guarded might die. We separated sooner than
we had planned or had originally wished. We
were happy that we had parted, for we were
still carrying home with us a precious heritage
from our youth : our friendship — which had not
yet been destroyed, but slightly bruised by rude
and heavy hands. We shuddered how near wc
were to including ourselves among the dead.

Was that anything wonderful ? Years had
passed. Each one of us had experienced
thousands of impressions, and what had once
been common and had borne the same image
had become so different that it would have been

ALL-SOULS 209

impossible to recognize them as having had a
common origin. And thus it is that we stand
on the roads that once were so near each other
but are now so wide apart and that we call to
each other like frightened children seeking flowers
in the woods and longing anxiously to hear the
voices of their comrades. We call to each other
to prove to ourselves that we have not died.

It is all souls' day. Numberless persons are
making pilgrimages to the graves of their dead
to lay a flower there. I stay at home and close
my eyes. I am not crying for the dead who
have died but live for me. I am weeping for
the dead who still live but who are dead
to me. . . .

MIRROR SLAVES.

There are persons who spend their entire lives
under the tyranny of the mirror. From early
morning to late at night they are thinking,
*' How do I look to-day ? " The mirror follows
them into their dreams and shows them their
ego horribly distorted and grotesquely trans-
formed, or it annihilates the imperfections
which make them so unhappy. Everybody
has a tremendous interest in his personal
appearance, an interest which may assume
such proportions as to amount to self-love, to
being in love with one's bodily ego, or to hatred
of one's self, disgust with one's own appearance.
Ultimately every one of us is egocentric. For
each one of us our ego is the hub of the world.
Every slightest happening is looked at and
judged from the standpoint of our own ego. In
the mirror slaves this trait is exaggerated to
the n-th degree, to the extent of being uncanny
and neurotic. They spend their lives in front
of the corporeal and spiritual mirror. For they
fix their gaze not only on their physical
appearance, but even on their thoughts, feelings,
sensations, and work ; they are constantly
checking themselves up, criticising themselves,
and are most discontented with themselves,

(2IO)

MIRROR SLAVES 211

©r they are ridicously conceited, and never cease
to admire their actions and transformations.

Mirror slaves waste a part of their lives in
front of the mirror. They keep a little mirror
by them constantly so as to look at themselves
from time to time. They can't pass a mirror
without stopping in front of it long enough to
survey themselves from head to foot. There is
a story of a king who promised to give his
daughter in marriage to the man who would pass
a certain mirror without looking into it. Vanity
foiled all but a poet, and the princess was awarded
to him. (And, in all probability, the poet did
not look into the mirror because he was absorbed
in admiring his ego in the mirror of his soul ! )
This story teaches us the intensity of human
vanity. In the case of mirror slaves this human
failing becomes a disease ; it fills their lives and,
under certain circumstances, unfits them for
life.

A mirror slave devotes a great deal of attention
to the matter of his external appearance. He
is dominated by an imperative which makes life
a torture. This imperative is : " What will
people think of me ? " He feels all eyes are upon
him, everybody is looking at him, everybody is
thinking of his appearance. He has a horrible
fear of being laughed at. For God's sake ! only
not to be laughed at, not to become the subject
of other people's mirth ! He would love to be
lost in the crowd and not be noticed. If he
could only possess a magic cap that would enable

212 MIRROR SLAVES

him to go about invisible ! On the other hand
he thirsts for triumphs. He would like to find
favour, to be larger, bigger, more elegant and
more beautiful than others, would like to shine in
society, and be able to outshine others in wit,
intellect, vivacity, education and culture. Above
all he is desirous of making an impression
on the opposite sex, to make conquests, to be
a Lothario, free from all restraints, uninterfered
with in his inclinations, and unconcerned about
the judgment of his environment.

The mirror slave begins his day with the
question, " What shall I wear to-day ? " As
soon as a careful inspection has convinced him
that this is going to be a good or a bad day for
him, that he is looking younger or older, sick
or well, the painful task of selection begins.
What dress will be most adapted to the tasks of
this day, to the weather, or to the mood ? After
some deliberation a choice is made. But then,
all of a sudden, the mirror discloses a blemish !
Woe ! The toilet must be gone all over again.
Everything is weighed carefully in the balance,
and finally the arduous task is completed.

And now the mirror slave's martyrdom begins.
He studies the people he meets to see whether
they greet him or ignore him, are friendly or
unfriendly, pleased or indifferent, etc., whether
they take note of him, whisper behind his back,
criticise him, make remarks about him, or make
merry over him. If one laughs without his
participation he is on the rack ; unquestionably

MIRROR SLAVES 213

it was he who was being laughed at : there must
be something wrong with his clothes. Why-
is everybody looking at him so curiously ? In his
distress he may even be induced to address
strangers. ** Why did they stare at me so
fixedly ? " In a sudden outburst of passion he
may even call an acquaintance to account for
not having greeted him or for having done so
carelessly.

He experiences extraordinary sensations when
he puts on new articles of clothing. What a
difficult task it is to go out in new shoes ! All
eyes must be magically directed on his shoes.
He makes himself ridiculous with his new shoes.
People surely think him silly or a slave of fashion.
He lives through aU this with every new garment,
and ultimately he develops a fear of changing
his clothes and goes about in old, worn, and even
shabby clothing, thinking that thus he attracts
less attention.

All daily tasks become a great undertaking.
To go into a store to make a purchase, to enter
a theatre when other spectators are already
seated, or to look around for a seat in a restau-
rant, etc., are difficult and often impossible tasks.
He loves to be the first person in the theatre or
at the concert — to come in while the hall is
still empty. The selection of a seat is a source
of worry. A mirror slave would love to sit
alone in a box or in the front row if he were not so
afraid of being looked at — which is exactly what
he longs for. He therefore conceals himself in a

214 MIRROR SLAVES

modest inconspicuous seat, but docs n©t enjoy
himself because he is always impelled to observe
and study the people.

He is a slave of public opinion. At no price
would he do anything not quite proper, that
would cause the slightest head-shake, or would
make him the subject of public comment. He
would purchase the good-will of all, court
everybody's favour, and wants to be loved and
admired by the whole world. He spares no
pains to get the approval of his environment.
He is one of the eternally amiable, modest, and
helpful persons that we encounter now and then.
He gives very liberal tips in order that he may
be highly thought of. In fact, he loves to give
presents and fears nothing so much as being
thought niggardly.

In time he becomes socially useless. A
trivial public function, a speech, a betrothal,
any appearance in public liberates a whole
host of apprehensive ideas. If he happens to
be an artist he fears to make a public appearance,
and contents himself with being a teacher. If
he overcomes his fear of appearing in public, he
becomes the slave of the critics. An unfavour-
able criticism brings him to the verge of despair ;
a favourable criticism temporarily lifts him above
all difficulties.

If we inquire into the cause of this neurosis
we find it to be a defective educational method
in childhood, which has led the child to over-
value its environment and has inplanted in it a

MIRROR SLAVES 215

pathologic degree of vanity. How many parents
have the habit of calling the child's attention
to the fact that people are looking at it, observ-
ing it, or laughing at it ! How often when a
child is wearing a new garment is it told that
everybody is looking at it and admiring it !
And how often is a child admired and worshipped
to such an extent that it really imagines itself
the hub of its Httle world ! All the boundless
over-valuation of the world, of one's surroundings,
the striving for public recognition, for reputation,
for honour emanate from our childhood years.
We ought to make it our object to bring about
just the opposite. The child should be brought
up to be modest, to learn that happiness lies in
the feeling of having done one's duty, in the
quiet joys of life, in work, in a capacity for
enjoyment. It is our duty to limit the child's
vanity, to restrain his ambition, and to train
him to be self-reliant. One who has learned to
consider contentment with oneself — not self-
satisfaction based on vanity and arrogance —
as worth more than what people say about one
has found the way to health and happiness.

Who would deny that a mirror has its uses ?
Who does not know that it is necessary occasion-
ally to observe ourselves in the mirror of the
body and the soul so that we may recognize
our shortcomings, remove our blemishes, and
make ourselves better and more beautiful ?
All excess becomes a vice. A mirror is a danger-
ous thing for the vain person who cannot live

2i6 MIRROR SLAVES

without it. Everything is a mirror to him.
The world as a whole is a mirrored salon which
reflects his image from every point. But he
fails to see that behind these mirrors there is
another world to which he has lost access. For
the next step beyond this mirror-neurosis is
insanity, a disease which we now know is a
losing of oneself in oneself.

Printtd in Gr«at Britain by Th$ Ch»lt»nkam Pr$is, Cfulttnham, Glos.

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173 The depths of the soul

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